



■ 



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Gass Yj\ 

Book._ 

GcpightW. 

CflMRIGHT DEPOSIT: 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



THE RETURN TO FAITH, AND OTHER 
ADDRESSES 

12mo. Net, 75 cents 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

AND 

OTHER ADDRESSES 



By 

WILLIAM NORTH RICE 

Professor of Geology (Emeritus), Wesleyan University 




THE ABINGDON PRESS 
NEW YORK CINCINNATI 






Copyright, 1919, by 
WILLIAM NORTH RICE 



OLf -J 



©CI.A535151 



!0 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Preface 7 

I. The Poet of Science 11 

II. The Skeptical and the Dogmatic 

Tendency in Religious Thought 49 

III. Ethical and Religious Lessons of 

Science 75 

IV. The Sacredness of Human Person- 

ality 99 

V, The New Testament of To-day 123 

VI. The Sabbath and the Lord's Day . . . 145 

VII. Methodism in New England 173 

VIII. The Christian Era 203 



PREFACE 

In this little volume have been collected 
a number of addresses prepared for various 
occasions, mostly within the last few years. 
I have had a sufficiently partial judgment 
to fancy that they might be worthy of the 
limited immortality conferred by printer's 
ink. They deal with a variety of topics, and 
bear to each other no relation of mutual 
dependence. There is, however, one general 
thought upon which all of them in one way 
or another have some bearing. That thought 
is the adjustment of Christian faith and life 
and institutions to the ever-changing con- 
ditions which come with the lapse of time. 
Underlying all of them is the conviction that 
the great need of the moral life of humanity 
in our own age and in every age is "not a 
new Gospel, but the Gospel anew.'' 

Most of the addresses have been published 
substantially in the form in which they were 
delivered. A few of them have been con- 
siderably altered in adaptation to present 
conditions. I have chosen to preserve each 

7 



PREFACE 

of the addresses in a form complete in itself, 
though an inevitable consequence is the oc- 
currence of a certain amount of repetition. 

Two of the addresses have already been 
published, the second in The Independent, 
and the eighth in Zion's Herald. Grateful 
acknowledgments are made to the publishers 
of these periodicals, who have permitted the 
republication of the articles. The other ad- 
dresses now appear in print for the first 
time. 

I desire also to acknowledge my obliga- 
tion to my brother, the Rev. Charles Francis 
Rice, D.D., for assistance in reading proofs 
and for critical suggestions. 

William North Rice. 



8 



I 

THE POET OF SCIENCE 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

The subject announced for my lecture 
may arouse in some minds the thought that 
a devotee of the science which Huxley has 
defined as the science of mud is decidedly out 
of place when he attempts a literary criti- 
cism. My answer to that objection would 
be that I do not purpose to attempt a liter- 
ary criticism. I am not going to discuss 
poetry from a literary standpoint. The 
question whether Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 
considered as a poet, ranks first or only 
second in that galaxy of poets on both sides 
o.f the Atlantic who made the Victorian era 
illustrious, I shall leave literary critics to 
consider. I shall speak of the poetry of 
Tennyson as viewed from the standpoint of 
a student of science. 



In the first place, the claim of Tennyson 
to the title of "the poet of science" rests 

11 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

upon the fact that he was an observer of 
nature at first hand and that his descrip- 
tions are always phenomenally true. This 
is not by any means true of all literary men. 
A popular novelist, I believe, in painting an 
evening scene, describes the thin crescent of 
the new moon as rising in the east, which, 
it is safe to say, the new moon never did. A 
distinguished historian, wishing to empha- 
size in his description the fierce tumult of a 
Parisian mob in the French Revolution by 
contrast with the solemn calm of the 
heavens, says that on a certain evening, 
when things in Paris were especially tumult- 
uous, Orion and the Pleiades looked down 
upon them. An astronomical friend tells 
me that at that time in the year Orion and 
the Pleiades did not rise until four o'clock in 
the morning. Not all poets are observers 
of nature. The ancient poets in general 
were not in great degree observers of na- 
ture, with the striking exception of the 
Hebrew poets. The Hebrew psalmists and 
prophet bards seem in this respect far more 
modern than the classical poets. They write 
of nature from first-hand observation and 
in the spirit of a genuine love of nature. 

12 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

The Hebrew poets, of course, are guiltless 
of any scientific interpretation of nature, 
but their descriptions of natural phenomena 
are true. The Latin and Greek poets deal 
with man, and very little with nature. The 
opening words of the iEneid, "Arma virum- 
que cano" and the first line of the Iliad, 
"Mtjvlv deeds, #ea, 'HrjhTjiddeG), 'A^A^pf," are ex- 
pressive of the spirit of classic poetry in 
general. My honored colleague, the profes- 
sor of Latin in Wesleyan University, finds 
in the poetry of Tibullus and Propertius 
scarcely any references to nature which are 
not merely conventional. Of the latter poet, 
my friend says, "His nature was mostly 
learned at second hand, and requires for its 
interpretation not a botany, an astronomy, 
or a physical geography, so much as a clas- 
sical dictionary." 

While, in general, modern poetry is char- 
acterized by deep appreciation of the charm 
of nature, it is not by any means true of all 
modern versifiers. The writers of hymns 
are a very useful class of people, but they 
are not always blessed with very much 
knowledge of nature or sympathy with 
nature. In the immensely numerous hymns 

13 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

of Charles Wesley we practically never find 
any reference to natural phenomena which 
is not obviously taken from the Bible. In 
so far as phrases in his hymns refer to any 
aspects of nature, they do not refer to the 
scenery of England, but to that of Palestine 
or Egypt. The following is rather an ex- 
ceptionally bad specimen of Charles Wes- 
ley's figurative use of supposed natural 
phenomena: 

"Thou Rock of my salvation, haste; 
Extend thine ample shade; 
And let it over me be cast, 
To screen my naked head. 

"O set upon thyself my feet, 
And make me surely stand; 
From fierce temptation's rage and heat 
Protect me with thy hand. 

"Now let me in the cleft be placed, 
Nor my defense remove; 
Within thine arms of love embraced — 
Thine arms of endless love." 

In this chaotic jumble of mixed metaphors, 
the basal idea is obviously an adaptation of 
the phrase of Isaiah, "the shadow of a great 
rock in a weary land." The picture which 
that phrase presents is significant in the 

14 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

Libyan or the Syrian desert, but in Eng- 
land it is absolutely meaningless. 

But phenomenal truth in the descrip- 
tion of nature is found so generally in 
modern poets that it would not alone justify 
the title which I have given to Tennyson. 
Yet I think it is true that he does show that 
characteristic in an eminent degree even as 
compared with most modern poets. When 
he tells us in "Maud," 

"My mood is changed, for it fell at a time of year 
When the face of night is fair on the dewy downs, 
And the shining daffodil dies, and the Charioteer 
And starry Gemini hang like golden crowns 
Over Orion's grave low down in the west," 

he gives us two phenomena whereby the time 
of the year is dated ; one, the appearance of 
certain constellations in the evening sky; 
the other, the close of the season of bloom 
of the daffodil. The astronomical date and 
the botanical date correspond with each 
other. The time of the year was the month 
of April. Tennyson occasionally employs 
very unusual descriptive phrases, which 
startle the reader and suggest a doubt as to 
whether they can be true ; and yet it will al- 
ways be found that they are truly descrip- 

15 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

tive of actual aspects of nature, though it 
may be somewhat exceptional ones. When 
he speaks in "Locksley Hall" of 

"Summer isles of Eden lying in dark-purple 
spheres of sea," 

the color attributed to the water is not that 
which we usually think of in connection with 
the sea, and yet most people who are familiar 
with the sea under varying conditions will re- 
call instances where its aspect is best de- 
scribed by the word "purple." The "scar- 
let shafts" of sunrise and of sunset in 
"Enoch Arden" certainly do not represent 
the most common colors of the sunrise or 
the sunset sky. Yet there are at times and 
in places scarlet sunrises and sunsets. The 
description of the sea as seen by an eagle at 
a lofty height is wonderfully painted in the 
line, 

"The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls." 

To those who have ever had the opportunity 
of looking down upon the waves of the sea 
from any considerable altitude, the descrip- 
tion of the surface as wrinkled and of the 
sea as crawling appears singularly accurate. 

16 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

II 

I pass on to another characteristic of 
Tennyson's poetry which marks him far 
more distinctively as the poet of science; 
and that is that he draws his material in 
large degree from recondite facts of science 
and from scientific theories. Other poets 
have sung the beauty of the 

"Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flow'r," 

or have felt the "harmonious madness" which 
ripples forth in the song of the skylark. In 
the verse of other poets we catch echoes of 

"The rhythm of autumn's forest dyes, 
The hymn of sunset's painted skies." 

Other poets in general deal with those phe- 
nomena of nature which at least potentially 
fall within the range of every man's obser- 
vation. Tennyson deals with phenomena 
that are only to be observed with the tele- 
scope or the microscope, and with theoretical 
interpretations of phenomena. He writes 
poetry on the nebular theory, and on the 
parallelism of ontogeny and phylogeny in 
organic evolution. 

I was talking once with a friend who is 
an astronomer, and he told me that Tenny- 

17 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

son's poetry was remarkable for the abun- 
dance of allusions to astronomical facts and 
theories. I told him that I had not observed 
that Tennyson was an astronomer, but that 
I knew that he was a geologist. The fact 
is, each one of us had seen in Tennyson what 
his own studies and habits of thought en- 
abled him to see. From Tennyson's biog- 
raphy we learn that the sciences of astron- 
omy and geology kindled his imagination 
very early, and that all through life he was 
profoundly impressed by the sublimity of 
astronomical spaces and geological times. 

I give a few illustrations of Tennyson's 
astronomical allusions. From one of his 
"Juvenile Poems": 

"The rays of many a rolling central star, 
Aye flashing earthwards, have not reached us 

yet." 

The almost inconceivable distances of the 
stars are measured by the ages occupied in 
the rapid transmission of light. From "The 
Palace of Art": 

"Reign thou apart, a quiet king, 
Still as, while Saturn whirls, his steadfast shade, 
Sleeps on his luminous ring." 
18 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

As we gaze upon Saturn through a tele- 
scope, though the planet is rotating and the 
ring is revolving around it, the shadow of 
the planet upon the ring appears motionless. 
The theory of the tides appears in a passage 
from the same poem, in the significant word 
"moon-led." 

"A still salt pool, locked in with bars of sand, 
Left on the shore ; that hears all night 
The plunging seas draw backward from the land 
Their moon-led waters white." 

In the earliest edition of that poem one of 
the striking features of the palace in which 
the soul was supposed to enjoy the selfish 
delight of intellectual isolation was an as- 
tronomical observatory. In later editions 
the description of the observatory was 
omitted. The maturer judgment of the poet 
recognized that, though the description of 
the observatory was beautiful in itself, the 
poem as a whole was better without it. The 
general effect of the palace was better after 
the observatory was pulled down. In those 
stanzas in which we are told what was seen 
from the observatory, the poet fairly revels 
in the sublime conceptions of astronomy. 

19 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

"Hither, when all the deep unsounded skies 
Shuddered with silent stars, she clomb, 
And as with optic glasses her keen eyes 

Pierced through the mystic dome, 

"Regions of lucid matter taking forms, 
Brushes of fire, hazy gleams, 
Clusters and beds of worlds, and bee-like swarms 
Of suns, and starry streams. 

"She saw the snowy poles and moons of Mars, 
That marvellous field of drifted light 
In mid Orion, and the married stars." 

The "regions of lucid matter taking forms" 
are of course nebulae, which, according to 
the nebular theory, were conceived to repre- 
sent an earlier stage of evolution of plane- 
tary systems similar to our own. The phrase 
"married stars" is a singularly beautiful 
description of stars which are physically 
double, as forming one system revolving 
around their common center of gravity. In 
contrast with these, there may be stars 
which are optically double, in that they hap- 
pen to be nearly in the same direction from 
our point of view. The nebular theory ap- 
pears again in a striking passage in "Locks- 
ley Hall Sixty Years After." 

20 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

"Warless? war will die out late then. Will it 
ever? late or soon? 
Can it, till this outworn earth be dead as yon 
dead world, the moon? 

Dead the new astronomy calls her — . . . , 

Dead, but how her living glory lights the hall, 

the dune, the grass ! 
Yet the moonlight is the sunlight, and the sun 

himself will pass." 

According to the nebular theory in its 
Laplacean form, the earth is undergoing 
progressive refrigeration, and will sometime 
be like the moon, which is already cold and 
dead ; and even the blazing sun, whose light 
is reflected in the moonlight, is destined 
ultimately to the same refrigeration and 
death. This was good science when Tenny- 
son wrote it, though now the Laplacean 
theory itself is dead, and we are not quite 
as definite as formerly in our views of the 
origin and destiny of the solar system. 
From "In Memoriam": 

"Sweet Hesper-Phosphor, double name 
For what is one, the first, the last, 
Thou, like my present and my past, 
Thy place is changed; thou art the same." 
21 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

Venus appears as morning star or evening 
star, as in its revolution it changes its posi- 
tion relative to the sun. 

A few geological passages. From "In 
Memoriam" : 

"There rolls the deep where grew the tree. 
O earth, what changes thou hast seen! 
There where the long street roars, hath been 
The stillness of the central sea. 

"The hills are shadows, and they flow 

From form to form, and nothing stands; 
They melt like mist, the solid lands, 
Like clouds they shape themselves and go." 

In this stanza we have exactly the concep- 
tion of the history of geographical change 
which characterized the geology of Sir 
Charles Lyell, and that was the best geology 
there was in the days when "In Memoriam" 
was written. It was not until later that our 
American geologist Dana announced the 
doctrine of the substantial permanence of 
continent and ocean, and it was very much 
later that that doctrine came into general 
acceptance. Most of us now believe that 
great areas of our continents have from 
time to time been covered by the waters of 

22 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

the sea, but, at least for the most part, by 
shallow seas, not by oceanic depths. An- 
other stanza of the same poem: 

"The moanings of the homeless sea, 

The sound of streams that swift or slow- 
Draw down, aeonian hills, and sow 
The dust of continents to be." 

Here we have the representation of the 
gradual degradation of the continents by the 
agencies of subaerial denudation. From the 
same poem, again: 

"The solid earth whereon we tread 

In tracts of fluent heat began, 

And grew to seeming-random forms, 
The seeming prey of cyclic storms, 

Till at the last arose the man." 

Here we have, of course, the primitively 
molten or gaseous earth which was the neces- 
sary geological corollary of the nebular 
theory of Laplace. That was good geology 
as long as Tennyson lived ; but in these later 
years in which we have lost faith in the 
Laplacean form of the nebular theory, we 
have grown pretty skeptical about any mol- 
ten stage in the history of the earth. From 
"The Two Voices": 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

"... When first the world began, 
Young nature through five cycles ran, 
And in the sixth she molded man." 

In these lines, I suppose, the poet must refer 
to the interpretation of the Mosaic days of 
creation as symbols of indefinite periods of 
time — a conception which served as a very 
convenient half-way station, between the be- 
lief in the literal truth of the narratives of 
creation in Genesis, and our present belief 
that the Mosaic days have no scientific 
meaning whatever. How impressively the 
truth of the appearance and extinction of 
successive faunas in geological times, and 
the awful question which those facts in- 
evitably suggest to the thoughtful mind, are 
presented in those lines from "In Me- 
moriam": 

" 'So careful of the type?' but no. 

From scarped cliff and quarried stone 
She cries, 'A thousand types are gone : 
I care for nothing, all shall go. 

" 'Thou makest thine appeal to me : 
I bring to life, I bring to death : 
The spirit does but mean the breath: 
I know no more.' " 

While I think it is probably true that 
24 J 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

Tennyson's poetry is richer in astronomical 
and geological material than in matter be- 
longing to the other sciences, it is certainly 
true that in considerable degree his writings 
abound in references to facts and theories of 
various other departments of science. How 
beautiful is his description of the meta- 
morphosis of the dragon-fly in "The Two 
Voices"! 

"To-day I saw the dragon-fly 
Come from the wells where he did lie. 

"An inner impulse rent the veil 
Of his old husk: from head to tail 
Came out clear plates of sapphire mail. 

"He dried his wings : like gauze they grew ; 
Through crofts and pastures wet with dew 
A living flash of light he flew." 

With what startling truth the parallelism 
between the embryological development of 
the individual and the succession of related 
types is presented in those lines of "In 
Memoriam" ! — 

"A soul shall draw from out the vast 
And strike his being into bounds, 

"And, moved thro' life of lower phase, 
Result in man, be born and think." 
25 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

How impressively the insoluble mystery of 
life, alike in its highest and in its lowest 
forms, is brought before us in that beautiful 
fragment! — 

"Flower in the crannied wall, 
I pluck you out of the crannies, 
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, 
Little flower — but if I could understand 
What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
I should know what God and man is." 

Of course a man with so comprehensive 
and profound a knowledge and appreciation 
of astronomical, geological, and biolog- 
ical science was an early convert to evo- 
lution. In fact, he hardly needed any con- 
version. We learn that in a college debating 
society he maintained that the "development 
of the human body might possibly be traced 
from the radiated, vermicular, molluscous, 
and vertebrate organisms." It is needless 
to say that the idea of one continuous line 
of evolution from the lowest to the highest 
form of life is very different from the con- 
ception of evolution as held to-day. The 
progress of evolution has been along many 
radiating lines. Sea-urchins and cuttle- 

26 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

fishes are certainly not in the line of human 
pedigree. But no less interesting is the fact 
that Tennyson in his college days was al- 
ready speculating on evolutionary theories. 
It was in pre-Darwinian days that he wrote 
in "In Memoriam," 

"... Arise and fly 

The reeling Faun, the sensual feast ; 
Move upward, working out the beast, 
And let the ape and tiger die." 

I do not pretend to know how definite an 
evolutionary conception he intended to ex- 
press in those words. Whether we are evo- 
lutionists or not, we must recognize that 
there are moods of human feeling and pas- 
sion that are ape-like and others that are 
tiger-like; but, in view of what we know of 
his early disposition to evolutionary specula- 
tion, it seems to me probable that in this 
passage of "In Memoriam" he did have a 
more or less distinct reference to the idea of 
man being descended from lower forms of 
mammalia. Of course, if that was his con- 
ception, it was a crude one; for, though the 
evolutionist of to-day traces the origin of 
man to ape-like forms, it is perfectly certain 

27 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

that the tiger could never have been in the 
line of human ancestry. The carnivora are 
highly specialized in a totally different direc- 
tion from that line of evolution which re- 
sulted in man. 

Whatever Tennyson's evolutionary con- 
ceptions may have been in pre-Darwinian 
days, it is very certain that he gave early 
acceptance to the views of Darwin, and that 
he clearly recognized the role of evolution, 
even in the ethical development of humanity. 
In his poem entitled, "By an Evolutionist," 
we find a noble expression of ethical evolu- 
tion in the individual. 

"If my body come from brutes, though somewhat 
finer than their own, 
I am heir, and this my kingdom. Shall the 
royal voice be mute? 
No, but if the rebel subject seek to drag me from 
the throne, 
Hold the scepter, Human Soul, and rule thy 
province of the brute. 

"I have climbed to the snows of Age, and I gaze 
at a field in the Past, 
Where I sank with the body at times in the 
sloughs of a low desire, 
28 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

But I hear no yelp of the beast, and the Man is 
quiet at last, 
As he stands on the heights of his life with 
a glimpse of a height that is higher." 

In "The Making of Man," we have the 
ethical evolution of the race. 

"Where is one that, born of woman, altogether 
can escape 
From the lower world within him, moods of tiger, 
or of ape? 
Man as yet is being made, and ere the crown- 
ing Age of ages, 
Shall not seon after aeon pass and touch him into 
shape? 

"All about him shadow still, but, while the races 
flower and fade, 
Prophet-eyes may catch a glory slowly gaining 
on the shade, 
Till the peoples all are one, and all their voices 
blend in choric 
Hallelujah to the Maker, 'It is finished. Man 
is made.' " 

Very curious is the persistence of the tiger 
in the supposed roll of human ancestry ; but 
the general conception of ethical evolution 
is nobly expressed. 

29 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

III 

I call Tennyson the poet of science, 
thirdly, on account of a certain characteris- 
tic of his view of nature which I do not 
know exactly how to name. I am tempted 
to call it the materialism of his view of 
nature. I am tempted again to call it the 
prosaic truthfulness of his view of nature. 
I can, perhaps, best illustrate what I mean 
by contrast. Tennyson has been censured 
by some of the aesthetic critics for not find- 
ing that imaginary personality in nature in 
general or in particular objects of nature 
which other poets have thought they found. 
Stopford Brooke finds fault with Tennyson 
for not seeing nature alive as Wordsworth 
did. I confess I do not exactly understand 
what the critic means ; and, as I do not un- 
derstand him, I quote his words instead of 
attempting to express his idea in any words 
of my own. 

Wordsworth "believed within his poetic self 
that Nature was alive in every vein of her; 
thought, loved, felt, and enjoyed in her own way, 
not in a way the same as we, but in a similar way, 
so» similar that we could communicate with her 
and she with us, as one spirit can communicate 
30 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

with another. ' Then, what is true of the whole 
of nature is true of the parts. Every flower, 
cloud, bird, and beast, every mountain, wood, 
every tree, every stream, the great sky and the 
mighty being of the ocean, shared in the life of 
the whole, and made it, in themselves, a particu- 
lar life. Each of them enjoyed, felt, loved, 
thought in its own fashion." 

Now we unesthetic scientists like Tennyson 
for precisely that characteristic which Stop- 
ford Brooke alleges as a fault. We geol- 
ogists think that a mountain range is usually 
the result of the crushing of a geosyncline 
by tangential pressure, and that a moun- 
tain peak is generally a remnant left in the 
erosion which has removed an immense mass 
of rock around it. Consequently, we do not 
believe that the mountain has a spirit with 
which we can enter into conversation. In 
fact, we prefer the oreads and dryads and 
naiads and nereids, and all the other "ads" 
and "ids" of classical mythology, which are 
at least time-hallowed, to the new mythology 
of aesthetic critics. 

There is, of course, a noble sense in which 
there is a spirit in all nature. All nature is 
instinct with immanent Deity, and no writer 

31 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

has ever expressed that thought more nobly 
than Tennyson in "The Higher Panthe- 
ism"; but that, I take it, is not what the 
critics mean. 

While Tennyson does not give us any 
revelation of imagined communion with the 
indwelling spirits of natural objects, he does 
sometimes show a marvelous power in the 
symbolic use of natural phenomena in the 
representation of human feeling. Some 
analogy or some contrast between the as- 
pects of nature and the moods of the human 
soul vivifies the expression of human feeling. 
Thus is represented in "Maud" the volup- 
tuous ecstasy of love's self -surrender: 

"For a breeze of morning moves, 

And the planet of love is on high, 
Beginning to faint in the light that she loves, 

On a bed of daffodil sky, 
To faint in the light of the sun she loves, 
To faint in his light, and to die." 

Or, for a very different mood, take the over- 
whelming pathos of that fragment, 

"Break, break, break, 

On thy cold gray stones, Sea ! 
And I would that my tongue could utter 
The thoughts that arise in me. 
32 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

"O, well for the fisherman's boy, 

That he shouts with his sister at play! 
O, well for the sailor lad, 

That he sings in his boat on the bay ! 

"And the stately ships go on 

To their haven under the hill ; 
But O for the touch of a vanished hand, 
And the sound of a voice that is still! 

"Break, break, break, 

At the foot of thy crags, Sea! 
But the tender grace of a day that is dead 
Will never come back to me." 

IV 

Lastly, and preeminently, I call Tenny- 
son the poet of science because he, more than 
any other, has given literary expression to 
the philosophy and the religious life of a 
scientific age. He is the prophet bard of 
the age to which his manhood belonged. 

The second half of the nineteenth cen- 
tury was eminently a scientific age. It was 
marked by extraordinary progress in the ap- 
plications of science for the material wel- 
fare of mankind. But of far greater sig- 
nificance were the purely intellectual 
achievements of the age. The distinctive 
33 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

work of that age in the intellectual history 
of mankind was to bring to full realization, 
in the doctrine of the conservation of energy 
and in the doctrine of evolution, that con- 
ception of the unity of nature which had 
dawned a century and a half before in New- 
ton's discovery of gravitation. 

That age of scientific achievement was an 
age of religious skepticism. In one sense, 
the spirit of science is essentially and always 
skeptical. Science accepts no belief on au- 
thority. Science recognizes the fallibility of 
all mental processes and the uncertainty of 
all conclusions. The scientific man can 
never feel sure that the last word has been 
said on any subject. New facts may be 
discovered, or old facts may be placed in 
new relations, so as to unsettle beliefs which 
had seemed well established. 

The popular religious beliefs of the 
middle of the nineteenth century were ill- 
adapted to resist the disintegrating tend- 
encies of scientific thought. The popular 
religious faith was founded on the supposed 
inerrancy of the Bible, notwithstanding the 
obvious contradictions contained within the 
Bible, and the contradictions between the 

34 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

Bible and beliefs rendered probable by the 
study of science and history. The church 
had lost sight of the great truth that the 
foundation of its faith is not an inerrant 
book, but a unique Personality. The pre- 
vailing form of theistic belief had lost sight 
of the great truth of the divine immanence 
in the ordinary processes of nature, and 
looked for God only in the supposed gaps in 
the continuity of nature. To the popular 
faith God was lost, if science could fill those 
gaps. 

The unification of physical and vital 
forces, as formulated in the doctrine of con- 
servation of energy, involves inevitably a 
tendency to ignore all phenomena which can- 
not be completely formulated in terms of 
physics and chemistry. The doctrine of 
evolution emphasizes the kinship between 
man and the lower animals ; and, in dwelling 
upon that phase of truth, men were led to 
ignore or to seek to explain away all ex- 
periences which were peculiar to man. 

It is no wonder that the tremendously 
startling revelations of science which marked 
the middle of the nineteenth century were 
connected with a widespread skepticism in 

35 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

religion. Yet that skepticism was very dif- 
ferent from the flippant infidelity of the 
eighteenth century. The skepticism of the 
nineteenth century was not an amusement, 
but an agony. That age of doubt was an 
age of intense moral earnestness; and to 
that intensely ethical spirit the loss of the 
hallowed faith which had been associated 
with the loftiest development of human 
character was an experience of intense men- 
tal anguish. There is a wondrous pathos 
in the utterances of some of the scientific 
men who in that period of storm and stress 
lost their faith. So William Kingdon Clif- 
ford speaks of parting from the faith of his 
childhood "with such searching trouble as 
only cradle faiths can cause. We have seen," 
he continues, "the spring sun shine out of an 
empty heaven to light up a soulless earth; 
we have felt with utter loneliness that the 
Great Companion is dead." In the same 
spirit George John Romanes expresses him- 
self. "The universe to me has lost its soul 
of loveliness. . . . When at times I think, 
as think at times I must, of the appalling 
contrast between the hallowed glory of that 
creed which once was mine and the lonely 
36 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

mystery of existence as now I find it, at such 
times I shall ever feel it impossible to avoid 
the sharpest pang of which my nature is 
susceptible." 

In that moral earnestness was the prom- 
ise of returning faith. There was light at 
evening time for some whose lives had been 
shrouded for a time in darkness; there was 
light at evening time for the general life of 
humanity; the dawn of the twentieth cen- 
tury was bright with a new faith and hope. 

Of all this experience of intellectual 
doubt, of moral earnestness, of faith at last 
triumphant, Tennyson's poetry is the su- 
preme literary expression. In 1830 he pub- 
lished a poem with the strange title, "Sup- 
posed Confessions of a Second-rate Sensi- 
tive Mind." After its first publication, the 
poem was suppressed for more than a half- 
century, but has been included in the later 
complete editions of Tennyson's works. It 
was not such poetry as he wrote after he had 
learned his art ; but it is interesting as show- 
ing how early there fell over the faith of his 
childhood the shadow of doubt. A few lines 
of that poem reveal at once the experience 
of doubt and the longing for faith: 
37 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

"Would that my gloomed fancy were 
As thine, my mother, when with brows 
Propt on thy knees, my hands upheld 
In thine, I listened to thy vows, 
For me outpoured in holiest prayer — 
For me unworthy ! — and beheld 
Thy mild deep eyes upraised, that knew 
The beauty and repose of faith, 
And the clear spirit shining through." 

His poetry as a whole breathes that intense 
moral earnestness which led him to a tri- 
umphant faith. The story of his own life 
is told in the words which he wrote of his 
beloved Hallam: 

". . . One indeed I knew, 

In many a subtle question versed, 
Who touched a jarring lyre at first, 
But ever strove to make it true: 

"Perplexed in faith, but pure in deeds, 
At last he beat his music out. 
There lives more faith in honest doubt, 
Believe me, than in half the creeds." 

But Tennyson's contribution to Chris- 
tian thought lies not alone in the fact of his 
personal experience of doubt and of faith 
triumphant over doubt. We cannot claim 
to have reached any complete solution of 

38 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

the problems presented to faith by modern 
scientific theories. The development of a 
complete and consistent philosophy at once 
evolutionary and theistic must wait for a 
wiser generation than ours. We see in a 
mirror enigmatically; 1 we know in part. 
But, though we have reached no complete 
solution, we have reached certain provisional 
adjustments which establish for us a modus 
vivendi while the surveys for the delimita- 
tion of the territories of science and religion 
are in progress. It is noteworthy that all 
these partial and tentative solutions of the 
problems of the age find poetic expression 
in Tennyson. 

We have learned not to expect or demand 
demonstrations of religious faith, but to be 
content with reasonable probabilities. We 
have learned to base our life upon the great 
hope which can never be proved or dis- 
proved. And so Tennyson tells us: 

"That we may lift from out of dust 
A voice as unto him that hears, 
A cry above the conquered years 
To one that with us works, and trust, 



1 BX^vofiev yhp Apri 5i iffSirrpov iv alvlyfiari,. — 1 Cor. 13. 12. 

39 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

"With faith that comes of self-control, 
The truths that never can be proved 
Until we close with all we loved 
And all we flow from, soul in soul." 

We have learned that the evidence of 
theistic belief is to be found in man rather 
than in inanimate nature or in the lower 
orders of animate nature. The belief in 
Divine Personality is easy for one who 
truly believes in the personality of man. 
The God who is veiled in nature is revealed 
in man. In those profoundly interesting 
fragments of intellectual and religious auto- 
biography which Romanes has left to us in 
his "Thoughts on Religion," he tells us that 
he lost his faith in God in the exclusive study 
of the lower orders of creation, and found 
God through the study of what is peculiar 
and distinctive in the spiritual life of man. 
This thought we find in "In Memoriam": 

"I found Him not in world or sun, 
Or eagle's wing, or insect's eye, 
Nor through the questions men may try, 
The petty cobwebs we have spun. 

"If e'er when faith had fallen asleep^ 
I heard a voice, 'Believe no more,' 
40 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

And heard an ever-breaking shore 
That tumbled in the Godless deep, 

"A warmth within the breast would melt 
The freezing reason's colder part, 
And like a man in wrath the heart 
Stood up and answered, 'I have felt.' 

"No, like a child in doubt and fear: 

But that blind clamor made me wise; 
Then was I as a child that cries; 
But, crying, knows his father near." 

We have learned to find the reconciliation 
of the scientific conception of law and the 
religious conception of personal will in the 
doctrine of the divine immanence. Never 
has that truth been more nobly expressed 
than in Tennyson's "The Higher Panthe- 
ism." 

"The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills, 
and the plains — 
Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him who 

reigns ? 

"Is not the Vision He, though He be not that 
which He seems? 
Dreams are true while they last, and do we not 
live in dreams? 



41 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

"Glory about thee, without thee; and thou ful- 
fillest thy doom, 
Making Him broken gleams, and a stifled splen- 
dor and gloom. 

"Speak to Him thou, for He hears, and Spirit 
with Spirit can meet — 
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than 
hands and feet. 

"God is law, say the wise; O Soul, and let us 
rejoice, 
For if He thunder by law, the thunder is yet 
His voice." 

We have learned that the Divine Per- 
sonality finds its supreme revelation in 
Christ. Jesus Christ himself thus becomes 
to us the supreme evidence of Christianity. 
We do not, like the great apologists of 
the eighteenth century, attempt to derive 
Christianity as a corollary from the doctrine 
of theism. We have learned that the evi- 
dence of Christianity is stronger than that of 
simple theism. And in this view Tennyson 
wrote : 

"Though truths in manhood darkly join, 

Deep-seated in our mystic frame, 

We yield all blessing to the name 

Of Him who made them current coin ; 

42 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

"For Wisdom dealt with mortal powers, 
Where truth in closest words shall fail, 
Where truth embodied in a tale 
Shall enter in at lowly doors. 

"And so the Word had breath, and wrought 
With human hands the creed of creeds 
In loveliness of perfect deeds, 
More strong than all poetic thought; 

"Which he may read that binds the sheaf, 
Or builds the house, or digs the grave, 
And those wild eyes that watch the wave 
In roarings round the coral reef." 

In the majestic proem of "In Memoriam" 
is summed up the intellectual and religious 
life of that half -century of which we have 
been speaking. There we find the agony of 
doubt, the invincible moral earnestness, the 
light at evening time. 

"Strong Son of God, immortal Love, 

Whom we, that have not seen thy face, 
By faith, and faith alone, embrace, 
Believing where we cannot prove; 

"Thou wilt not leave us in the dust: 
Thou madest man, he knows not why, 
He thinks he was not made to die; 
And thou hast made him: thou art just. 
43 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

"Thou seemest human and divine, 

The highest, holiest manhood, thou. 
Our wills are ours, we know not how; 
Our wills are ours, to make them thine. 

"Our little systems have their day; 

They have their day and cease to be; 
They are but broken lights of thee, 
And thou, Lord, art more than they. 

"We have but faith: we cannot know, 
For knowledge is of things we see; 
And yet we trust it comes from thee, 
A beam in darkness: let it grow. 

"Let knowledge grow from more to more, 
But more of reverence in us dwell; 
That mind and soul, according well, 
May make one music as before, 

"But vaster. We are fools and slight; 
We mock thee when we do not fear; 
But help thy foolish ones to bear ; 
Help thy vain worlds to bear thy light." 

No wonder that the poet who could chant 
that mighty psalm of doubt and faith at the 
beginning of the age of scientific skepti- 
cism, should at the close of that age breathe 
his serene trust in that sweetest of swan 
songs: 

44 



THE POET OF SCIENCE 

"Sunset and evening star, 

And one clear call for me! 
And may there be no moaning of the bar, 
When I put out to sea, 

"But such a tide as moving seems asleep, 
Too full for sound and foam, 
When that which drew from out the boundless 
deep 
Turns again home. 

"Twilight and evening bell, 
And after that the dark ! 
And may there be no sadness of farewell, 
When I embark; 

"For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place 
The flood may bear me far, 
I hope to see my Pilot face to face 
When I have crost the bar." 



45 



II 

THE SKEPTICAL AND THE DOG- 
MATIC TENDENCY IN RELI- 
GIOUS THOUGHT 



II 

THE SKEPTICAL AND THE DOG- 
MATIC TENDENCY IN RELI- 
GIOUS THOUGHT 

"Prove all things ; hold fast that which is 
good." — 1 Thessalonians 5. 21. 

"It was needful for me to write unto you, and 
exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for 
the faith which was once delivered unto the saints." 
—Jude 3. 

I have taken these two verses, without 
regard to their connection, simply as mot- 
toes, suggesting to us two different phases 
of religious thought. 

Every thoughtful man must recognize 
that our religious beliefs (like all other be- 
liefs outside of the extremely narrow range 
of truths which are known by intuition or 
by demonstration) are supported by merely 
probable evidence; and that the weight of 
that evidence is capable of being differently 
estimated by different persons, or by the 
same person at different times. There is no 
49 



THE SKEPTICAL AND THE 

demonstration of the existence of God; no 
demonstration of the historic facts relating 
to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, 
which are the basis of Christianity; no 
demonstration of any particular doctrine of 
religion. Moreover, every thoughtful man 
must admit that, in subjects so vast as to 
transcend human thought, all detailed and 
precise statements of belief must be only ap- 
proximations to the truth. No perfect defi- 
nition or formulation of truths relating to 
God and other themes transcending the 
reach of the human intellect can be given. 
As knowledge enlarges and habits of 
thought change from age to age, the formu- 
las which best expressed the faith of one 
age must necessarily fail of expressing the 
faith of another age. Our beliefs are prob- 
able, not demonstrable; approximations to 
the truth, not exact statements of the truth : 
and with the progress of thought they may 
be greatly changed. 

On the other hand, men who act at all in 
the ordinary affairs of life, are accustomed 
to act upon beliefs which are only probable, 
and upon formulas which are only approxi- 
mations to the truth. When we build a 

50 



DOGMATIC TENDENCY 

bridge we can never be sure that it will bear 
the strain that is to be imposed upon it. 
When a ship starts on a voyage we can never 
be sure that it will weather the storms of 
the ocean. We can never be sure that a 
medicine will exert a beneficial effect in any 
particular sickness. We can never be sure 
that any political measure will improve the 
condition of the community. And yet men 
engage, and rightly engage, with earnest- 
ness and confidence in the varied businesses 
of life, guiding their actions by beliefs 
which are only probable. It is wise, there- 
fore, to act, in religious matters, upon the 
same principles on which we act in other 
matters. It is reasonable and wise to assume 
beliefs to be true which are only probable 
approximations to the truth, and to act upon 
them with earnestness and vigor propor- 
tionate to the importance of the subject. 

Thus, in the nature of the case, we have 
a warrant for each of two complementary 
phases of religious thought; on one hand, 
for the admission that there is an element 
of uncertainty in all our beliefs, and that 
all our beliefs can be only approximations 
to the truth; on the other hand, for the as- 

51 



THE SKEPTICAL AND THE 

sumption that the nearest attainable ap- 
proximations to the truth may and should 
be acted upon as truth, and made the basis 
of an earnest Christian life. We may call 
these two phases or tendencies of Christian 
thought, respectively, the skeptical and the 
dogmatic phase or tendency. I am aware 
that both of these terms may seem objec- 
tionable, since the word "skeptical" is usu- 
ally understood as implying a culpably ex- 
cessive tendency to doubt, while the word 
"dogmatic" is often understood as implying 
an unreasonable positiveness in belief; but 
I use these terms because I do not know of 
any other words which will express so well 
the antithesis which I have in mind. 

There is, as we have seen, a warrant for 
both these phases of thought in the nature 
of the case, and both gain an additional war- 
rant from the history of religious thought in 
the past. If we look at the history of reli- 
gious opinions, we shall see that there has 
been, in the past, a continual change, which 
leads us to believe that there will be changes 
in the future. The Christian belief of the 
twentieth century is not the same as that 
of the fifteenth or the fifth or the first cen- 

52 



DOGMATIC TENDENCY 

tury. It is not likely that the religious be- 
lief of the twenty-fifth or of the thirtieth 
century will be the same as that of the twen- 
tieth. The biblical astronomy of three hun- 
dred years ago, and the biblical geology of 
one hundred years ago, are well-nigh for- 
gotten; and the majority of thoughtful men 
have outgrown those views of the nature 
and scope of inspiration which rendered a 
biblical astronomy and geology necessary. 
The angelology and demonology which were 
considered formerly an essential part of reli- 
gious belief have mostly passed from the 
sphere of dogma into that of rhetoric. There 
has been a change in the mode of conception 
and formulation even of the central doc- 
trines of Christianity. The controversies of 
the first centuries of the church have so com- 
pletely passed by that an intelligent Chris- 
tian of our own day requires an explanation 
of the terms which were once the watchwords 
and shibboleths of sects and parties. The 
barbarous subtleties of the Athanasian 
Creed are not so much incredible as unin- 
telligible. Few Lutherans or Calvinists or 
Wesleyans profess to believe, and probably 
none do believe, exactly what Luther or Cal- 
53 



THE SKEPTICAL AND THE 

vin or Wesley believed. The very forms of 
language, in creed and liturgy, in hymn and 
homily, which, in one age, form the fittest 
garb for the most vital thought and feeling, 
become, in a succeeding age, fit only for 
mummy cloths to enwrap the dead. 

But, notwithstanding this continual 
change, there has been a unity of belief in 
all ages of the Christian Church. There has 
been a "faith once delivered to the saints," 
which has been ever the same. The great 
conception of God as our Father has been 
the same in all ages of the Christian Church. 
The faith of the church in Christ as the Re- 
vealer of God and the Saviour of men has 
never been shaken. The solemn truth of sin, 
and the promise of deliverance from sin 
through faith in Christ, have been held fast 
by the church in every age. The belief in 
retribution, and in a future life in which a 
man's condition will be in large degree de- 
pendent upon his character in this life, has 
been the faith of the church universal. The 
great changes which have taken place in 
Christian thought and Christian life illus- 
trate, rather than disprove, this essential 
unity. The preparation for each new stage 

54 



DOGMATIC TENDENCY 

of development of the Christian Church has 
always existed in the stages before it. It 
was the reading of the Epistles of Paul 
which flashed the light into Luther's soul at 
the beginning of the great German Refor- 
mation. And it was in the reading of those 
same epistles, enriched by Luther's com- 
mentary upon them, that Wesley's heart 
was "strangely warmed" at the beginning of 
the Methodist Revival. Even the advent 
of Christ himself was only a stage in a con- 
tinuous development. He came, as he tells 
us himself, not to destroy, but to fulfill. 
Every truth which blossomed in the teach- 
ing of our Lord Jesus, and which has fruited 
in the blessings of a Christian civilization, 
existed in germ in the Law and the 
Prophets. The whole argument of the 
Pauline Epistles and of the Epistle to the 
Hebrews, against the superstitious and un- 
progressive literalism of Jews and Juda- 
izers, is a commentary on the Master's 
words: "I came, not to destroy, but to ful- 
fill." When, therefore, we contend for "the 
faith once delivered to the saints," we are 
contending not only for the faith of the 
Christian ages, but for that which has been 
55 



THE SKEPTICAL AND THE 

the faith of pious souls in every age. There 
is something wonderfully impressive in this 
unity of religious thought running all 
through the ages. The God who walked 
with Enoch is the same God that reveals 
himself to the eye of penitence and faith to- 
day. The princes of European intellect 
have worshiped the God of Abraham, Isaac, 
and Jacob. The civilization of the twentieth 
century stands, with bowed head and un- 
sandaled feet, before the burning bush of 
Horeb. 

"Like a mighty army 

Moves the Church of God; 
Brothers, we ai;e treading 

Where the saints have trod; 
We are not divided, 

All one body we, 
One in hope and doctrine, 

One in charity." 

There is, then, a warrant, both a priori 
and a posteriori, both in the nature of the 
case and in the facts of history, for each 
of the phases of thought which we are con- 
sidering: on the one hand, for the admission 
that all religious beliefs are only more or 

56 



DOGMATIC TENDENCY 

less probable approximations to the truth, 
and may require modification in the light of 
the future; on the other hand, for the as- 
sumption that approximations to the truth 
are attainable, which are so near to absolute 
truth that we are justified in treating them 
as true and making them the basis of vigor- 
ous lives of Christian duty. 

Each of these two phases of religious 
thought has its value in the development of 
the religious character of the individual and 
of the church at large. 

It would seem that it ought to be unneces- 
sary to assert the value of the dogmatic ele- 
ment in individual character ; yet it is neces- 
sary to assert it because the fashion now is 
to deny it. It is the fashion to represent 
that dogma is obsolescent and ought to be 
obsolete; that the highest intellectual 
achievement is to believe nothing; that to 
believe anything earnestly and vigorously 
is a sign of intellectual weakness. In op- 
position to all such teaching we need to 
recognize the value of the dogmatic phase 
of religious thought. The very foundation 
of religion is to believe something, and that 
so earnestly as to be willing to fight for it, 
57 



THE SKEPTICAL AND THE 

suffer for it, die for it. A life of consecra- 
tion is utterly meaningless unless there is 
something to which life can be consecrated. 
Something must be believed in order that 
there may be any principle to underlie hu- 
man life. I do not propose to define exactly 
what that minimum of truth is which will 
suffice for the development of a religious 
life. Some minds may find a basis for a life 
that is truly religious in a creed as short 
and indefinite as Matthew Arnold's formula 
of "The not ourselves which makes for right- 
eousness." But whatever moral power there 
may be in such a faith lies in what it affirms, 
not in what it denies or ignores. Only 
as we believe something with tremendous 
earnestness are we able to act with moral 
strength and nobleness. The men whose 
names are traced on the roll of honor of 
church history; the men "who through faith 
subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, 
obtained promises, stopped the mouths of 
lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped 
the edge of the sword, out of weakness were 
made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned 
to flight the armies of the aliens"; the men 
who "were stoned," "were sawn asunder," 

58 



DOGMATIC TENDENCY 

"were slain with the sword," who "wandered 
about in sheep-skins and goat-skins," who 
"wandered in deserts and in mountains and 
in dens and caves of the earth"; "of whom 
the world was not worthy" — these were the 
heroes, not of skepticism, but of faith. 

But, however valuable, indispensable, 
fundamental, may be the dogmatic tend- 
ency, we must recognize the fact that, per- 
verted, it may lead to pernicious results in 
the development of the lif e of the individual. 

If a man comes to believe that his own 
conceptions, instead of being more or less 
probable approximations to truth, are abso- 
lute truth, he will come to regard those who 
differ with him in any particular as enemies 
of the truth. This is the origin of bigotry, 
the motive of persecution; and, though the 
forms of persecution change, the spirit of 
persecution is not altogether extinct in the 
church to-day. The dogmatic tendency 
needs to be restrained and tempered by a 
full and frank recognition that we are not 
the custodians of absolute truth; that our 
best conceptions of truth are only approxi- 
mations, and that wiser ages may make 
closer approximations to truth than we have 
59 



THE SKEPTICAL AND THE 

been able to make; that those who differ 
from us may even now be wiser than we, 
and their conceptions nearer approximations 
to absolute truth than ours. The spirit of 
skepticism, therefore, is necessary to temper 
the spirit of dogmatism. 

But, if the skeptical tendency of thought, 
within limits, is so beneficial, so necessary 
to the best development of Christian charac- 
ter, it becomes utterly ruinous when it runs 
to an extreme. I know of no character not 
debased by dishonesty nor corrupted by 
sensual vice more unworthy of our respect 
than that of him who is given over to uni- 
versal skepticism, who sees so plainly the 
errors of all creeds that he can have no 
creed, who believes nothing, and conse- 
quently has no aim, and spends his life in 
idleness and uselessness and helplessness. 
Such a character is truly and powerfully 
depicted, under the name of Edward Lang- 
ham, in Mrs. Ward's profoundly thought- 
ful novel, "Robert Elsmere." Heartily 
would I join in the petition of the litany, 
"From all false doctrine, heresy, and schism, 
good Lord deliver us!" But with yet more 
earnestness would I pray, "From liberalism 

60 



DOGMATIC TENDENCY 

and indifferentism and universal skepticism, 
good Lord deliver us!" Better error than 
indifference to truth. Better the terrible 
error of Saul, the persecutor, than the in- 
difference to truth which expressed itself in 
the scornful or despairing question of Pilate, 
"What is truth?" For honest error, how- 
ever dark and terrible that error may be, 
there is a cure; but for indifference to truth 
there is no cure. The man who has given 
up the search for truth has doomed himself 
to intellectual stagnation and moral death. 

We see, then, that the skeptical and the 
dogmatic tendency are alike necessary for 
the right development of individual Chris- 
tian character, and that they are required 
to exist in just coordination with each 
other. In proper limit and measure each 
has its office. The exaggeration of either 
may work ruinous consequences. 

Nor is it alone in the life of the individual 
that we may trace the influence of these two 
phases of religious thought. For good and 
for evil they have wrought in the history of 
the church at large. 

It is the dogmatic tendency in Christian 
thought which has enabled individual Chris- 

61 



THE SKEPTICAL AND THE 

tians to unite in ecclesiastical organizations 
and thus gain the power of vigorous collec- 
tive action. Thus it has rendered possible 
the great evangelistic, missionary, and phi- 
lanthropic enterprises which are transform- 
ing the life of humanity. And, while the 
dogmatic tendency has been the power 
which has given the church victory over 
its foes, the skeptical tendency has ever 
operated to keep the church in harmony with 
the best forms of intellectual life. It has 
reconciled again and again the incipient con- 
flicts between traditional views of Chris- 
tianity and the advancing thought of the 
times. It has made Christianity flexible and 
progressive, and enabled it to adapt itself 
to all that was best in a growing civilization. 
Most notably in the last few decades, the 
skeptical tendency has been influential in 
producing that mutual toleration which has 
rendered possible the cooperation and fed- 
eration of various denominations which re- 
tain their characteristic beliefs and usages 
and their administrative autonomy. So long 
as any church feels sure that its creed and 
polity and ritual constitute the one perfect 
manifestation of the truth of God on earth, 

62 



DOGMATIC TENDENCY 

for that church intolerance is a duty. When 
each church recognizes that all creeds are 
only approximations to the truth, mutual 
toleration becomes easy and natural. 

If we can so plainly see, in the history of 
the church, the benefits of these two tend- 
encies in religious thought, we can see no 
less plainly the evil effects of their perver- 
sion. For an example of the evils of un- 
checked skepticism, behold the Catholic 
Church in Italy, in the period immediately 
preceding the Reformation — the period 
when the heads of thinking men had been 
turned by the sudden revival of classic let- 
ters ; when half -pagan priests, more familiar 
with the mythology of Virgil and the elegant 
Epicureanism of Horace than with the the- 
ology of Paul and the ethics of the Sermon 
on the Mount, perfunctorily performed the 
ceremonies of a worship which for them had 
become only a mummery and a farce. Be- 
hold the church given over to the utter rot- 
tenness of hypocrisy. And, for an example 
of the evils of excessive dogmatism, behold 
the Counter-Reformation which followed so 
soon in the churches of southern Europe; 
that terrible Counter-Reformation, at whose 

63 



THE SKEPTICAL AND THE 

crimes against humanity the world still 
shudders, which established the Society of 
Jesus, fulminated the anathemas of the 
Council of Trent, decimated the population 
of southern Europe with the terrors of the 
Inquisition, and sought to stifle the human 
intellect beneath the Index Prohibitorius 
and the Index Expurgatorius. 

For the individual, then, and for the 
church, the true ideal is the just coordina- 
tion of these two complementary tendencies 
of religious thought. "What I most crave 
to see," said Thomas Arnold, "and what still 
seems to me no impossible dream, is inquiry 
and belief going together." That dream of 
Arnold is to-day more nearly fulfilled than 
he dared to hope. Far and wide in the 
churches we behold the manifestation of a 
spirit hospitable to new truth, ready to 
change the form of its opinions and adapt 
itself to the broadening thought of the age, 
and yet, at the same time, earnestly and 
reverently loyal to the best conceptions of 
truth which we have received from the past 
— a spirit ready to "prove all things" and 
to adopt new views which are commended 
by sound reason, while yet we "contend ear- 

64 



DOGMATIC TENDENCY 

nestly for the faith once delivered to the 
saints," which, in essential unity, has come 
down to us. In the manifold cooperative 
movements and federations of the churches, 
especially in the mission fields, in the har- 
monious work of army and navy chaplains 
of all names and creeds, in the Inter-Church 
World Movement which seems destined to 
unite all Protestant Christians of this coun- 
try in a world-wide missionary campaign of 
unexampled efficiency, we behold the evi- 
dence that the church is approaching more 
nearly than ever before a just coordination 
of the two complementary tendencies in reli- 
gious thought. 

These thoughts, it seems to me, have a 
special value to those in the formative stage 
of religious opinions. In a certain sense, 
indeed, we ought never to outgrow the 
formative stage of religious opinions. A 
great thinker once said to me, "When a 
man has grown too old to change his opin- 
ions, he is ready to die ; or, at least, he is not 
fit to live." Let us hope and pray that we 
may never reach that condition of mental 
petrifaction in which our beliefs will be 
incapable of change. But, while we should 

65 



THE SKEPTICAL AND THE 

always remain accessible to new views of 
truth, there is an appropriate sense in which 
we may speak of early manhood as the 
period of the formation of opinions. There 
comes, sooner or later, to almost every 
thoughtful young man, a time when he be- 
gins to suspect that the traditional creed he 
has received in childhood is not altogether 
adapted to the thought of his manhood. He 
comes to doubt more or fewer of the asser- 
tions and implications of that creed; or, if 
he does not doubt the creed itself, he begins 
to doubt at least the soundness of some of 
the arguments by which it has been sup- 
ported, and to suspect that, if he continues 
to believe the creed, it must be on other evi- 
dence and in relation with other philo- 
sophical principles than those with which it 
has been traditionally associated. What is 
the young man to do? 

There are three courses he may take. 

The spirit of dogmatism says: "What you 
have received is the truth ; it is 'the faith once 
delivered to the saints.' To doubt or dis- 
believe any part of that faith is to be dis- 
loyal to God. It is your duty to trample 
upon those doubts, and crush them by force 

66 



DOGMATIC TENDENCY 

of will, if you do not see how to refute them 
by argument." Alas ! too many young men 
have yielded to this appeal, and attempted 
to crush down doubt by force of will. The 
attempt may succeed, or it may fail ; I know 
not in which case the result is the more perni- 
cious. If the attempt succeeds, it makes 
the man a bigot and a persecutor ; if it fails, 
it dooms him to a life-long conflict between 
intellect and conscience. 

Skepticism says to him: "You have been 
led to doubt some parts of your creed ; there- 
fore cast away the whole of it, and, in utter 
intellectual nakedness, go about to seek for 
new beliefs in which you can clothe your- 
self." Alas! too many young men yield to 
this counsel. Rejecting the faith of their 
fathers, they reject also the practices which 
depend on that faith. No longer believing 
in God, they give up all forms of worship. 
They withdraw themselves from the church 
and from all its hallowed associations. No 
longer acknowledging the claims of Chris- 
tianity as a system of belief, they feel them- 
selves no longer bound by the restraints of 
Christianity as a rule of life. They expose 
themselves at once, without any bulwark of 

67 



THE SKEPTICAL AND THE 

defense, to all the temptations of the world, 
the flesh, and the devil; and too often they 
make utter shipwreck, not only of Christian 
faith, but also of moral character. 

There is a more excellent way. There is 
a golden mean between these two extremes. 
History warrants us in the belief that the 
main outlines of the faith which the church 
has held throughout all ages are true. His- 
tory also leads us to believe that the details 
of creed and the philosophy associated with 
Christian faith must be modified from age 
to age. It is the young man's duty, then, 
to meet the questions that come to him in a 
spirit which is in accord with these teachings 
of history. It is his right and duty to as- 
sume that there is a basis of truth in the 
faith which he has been taught, but that the 
incidentals and details of that faith will 
probably need, for him, some modification. 
Recognizing these two principles, the path 
is clear. We ought to hold our traditional 
faith as the basis of action, and, at the same 
time, keep ourselves ready with advancing 
knowledge to modify any part of that faith. 
The beliefs we already have we should hold 
on to till we get something better to take 

68 



DOGMATIC TENDENCY 

their place. Whenever a new belief com- 
mends itself to us as a new truth, we should 
seek to make such modifications of previous 
beliefs as are requisite for harmonious ad- 
justment; and thus gradually form for our- 
selves the creed of our manhood and old 
age. 

And we need not wait till the creed of 
our future is finished before commencing a 
life of Christian duty. Let us act each day, 
each hour, earnestly, vigorously, intensely, 
in the light of the best conceptions of truth 
we have thus far been able to gain. And, as 
we advance in years, and progress in knowl- 
edge and thought, we shall come to larger, 
clearer views of truth. We cannot, in- 
deed, come to a perfect knowledge of God's 
truth here. Not by the sunlight or candle- 
light of earth, but by the light of that world 
where the sunlight and the candle-light alike 
are needless, we may expect to read God's 
truth in its perfection. But it is our privi- 
lege to be continually making progress in 
the comprehension of divine things. We 
may put ourselves in the path of God's own 
guidance. We may work out our own salva- 
tion in intelligent accord with God's own 

69 



THE SKEPTICAL AND THE 

purposes. So in us shall be fulfilled the bene- 
diction of the Master, "If ye continue in my 
word, ye shall know the truth." And so for 
us shall be answered the great high-priestly 
prayer of Jesus, and through the truth we 
shall be sanctified. And thus shall swell con- 
tinually into a deeper, fuller harmony, the 
sweet accord of faith and duty. So shall 
we ever be in the path toward truth. I have 
very little faith in the ability of the human 
mind to find out the truth on any question 
by a short process of cramming ; but I have 
great faith in the power of the human soul 
that puts itself into alliance with truth and 
duty to grow in comprehension of the truth. 
And this progress of the individual will be in 
harmony with the great progress of the 
church universal ; for both will be in the line 
of God's own leading. Thus we think of 
our religious opinions not as a suit of clothes 
which we can take off and put on at pleas- 
ure. Our religious opinions are a growth 
— an organic, vital development in our 
souls. They grow with our growth, and 
strengthen with our strength. Our concep- 
tions of truth grow as our bodies grow. 
The gristly skeleton of childhood serves the 
70 



DOGMATIC TENDENCY 

purpose of the child's life, but serves also 
as the mold in which is developed the bony 
skeleton of manhood. Every organ is at 
once a machine for accomplishing the pur- 
poses of the present life, and a matrix in 
which is developed the corresponding organ 
which shall be fitted for the larger work of 
years to come. So our childhood's concep- 
tions of truth, imperfect as they are, serve 
to guide our child life, but serve also as the 
matrix in which are developed the larger 
conceptions of our manhood. In this growth 
of individual thought, as in the progress of 
the church at large, there is the continuity 
of organic development. Each stage, alike 
of individual and of collective religious life, 
is in vital connection with the past and the 
future. And, when at last that great meta- 
morphosis comes to us, and we pass from 
this embryo state of existence to the fuller 
life of that other world, there will still be 
no break in the continuity of spiritual life. 
We shall be born into the glories of that 
heavenly world with eyes already prepared 
for its beatific vision. 



Tl 



Ill 

ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS LES 
SONS OF SCIENCE 



Ill 

ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS LES- 
SONS OF SCIENCE 1 

The study of the relations of science and 
religion, which has seemed to me probably 
the most important part of my life-work, has 
required a division of my time and interest 
between the two great territories of thought 
whose relations to each other I have sought 
in some degree to interpret. In a certain 
sense, therefore, I have lived a double life, 
functioning sometimes, so to speak, as the 
Reverend Doctor Jekyll, and sometimes 
as Professor Hyde. In the two different 
capacities in which I have acted, I have been 
associated with two classes of intellectual 
workers whose habits of thought differ con- 
siderably from each other. I have learned 
to regard both groups of my associates with 
profound respect and admiration for their 
high intellectual and moral qualities, and to 



1 Address before the Mid-year Assembly of the New York 
East Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1908. 

75 



ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS 

feel a genial sympathy with both in what 
seem to me their faults and limitations. 

I wish to speak first of one exceedingly 
wholesome ethical effect of the habits of 
mind involved in scientific study, altogether 
irrespective of the particular opinions to 
which that study may lead. Scientific men, 
I think, exhibit the virtue of truthfulness in 
a higher degree than any other class of peo- 
ple. Of course, I do not mean that every 
individual of the class is thoroughly truth- 
ful. I have heard of a really able and justly 
renowned paleontologist who is said to 
have printed false dates on some of his pub- 
lications, in order to secure a claim of 
priority in the naming and description of 
certain species of fossils. But, if now and 
then a scientific man lies, it no more in- 
validates the claim of truthfulness for scien- 
tific men in general, than the fact that once 
in a while a minister of the gospel embezzles 
the funds of the church, or runs away with 
a deaconess or with the leading soprano of 
the choir, proves that the clergy as a class 
are immoral. In general, it is easy for a 
scientific man to be thoroughly truthful, for 
the simple reason that he is dealing with 

76 



LESSONS OF SCIENCE 

questions detached from human interests, 
the answer to which is therefore not likely 
to be influenced by prejudice. If a geolo- 
gist is studying the question whether the 
cause of the climate of the Glacial period 
was an impoverishment of the supply of 
carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere, or 
an excessive degree of eccentricity in the 
earth's orbit, he is not likely to feel any 
strong personal interest inclining him to pre- 
fer one answer of the question to the other. 
A fondness for a pet hypothesis may, indeed, 
create in the mind a certain amount of 
prejudice, but it is not likely to constitute 
a very strong motive for a misconception or 
misrepresentation of the facts involved. 

On the other hand, in the case of minis- 
ters of the gospel, temptations to insincerity 
continually arise from the fact that we are 
not dealing with abstract questions, but are 
dealing with questions of practical duty. It 
is not our business as preachers to teach 
abstract truth, but to persuade men to a 
right course of life. Precisely in that con- 
dition lies a subtle temptation to be not quite 
truthful. We are tempted to ask, in regard 
to any assertion which we make, not is that 

77 



ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS 

assertion exactly true, but, rather, will that 
assertion tend to lead men to do right. Of 
course the law of veracity does not require 
a man to say all that he thinks, about any 
subject on every occasion and in every com- 
pany. But when a man who has come to 
regard a traditional opinion as very doubt- 
ful and probably erroneous asserts from the 
pulpit without qualification the truth of that 
opinion, for fear that he may disturb the 
faith of other people, he is certainly guilty 
of a violation of the law of veracity. Some- 
times this sort of insincerity is even explicitly 
inculcated as a duty. In the recent decades 
in which the controversies over evolution and 
the higher criticism have been so violent, 
men of high authority in the churches have 
often explicitly affirmed that it is the duty 
of a preacher who has come to have some 
doubts in regard to the traditional views of 
the church, to suppress those doubts for fear 
he may injure the faith of others. Some of 
the men who have given these counsels, par- 
ticularly to young ministers, have seemed to 
assume that there is no necessary connection 
between a man's beliefs and his utterances, 
and that it is legitimate and praiseworthy 

78 



LESSONS OF SCIENCE 

for a man to announce opinions which he 
does not believe to be true. 

Of course the true pastor will never for- 
get the essentially practical character of 
genuine preaching. His business is to lead 
the members of his congregation into a bet- 
ter moral and religious life, not to lecture 
on doubtful questions of criticism or science 
or speculative philosophy or even theological 
dogma. His habitual selection of themes 
and his treatment of those themes will be 
governed by the dominant purpose of his 
work. He will emphasize the great truths 
of religion which are the foundation of the 
Christian life. I only insist that, when the 
preacher does refer to doubtful matters, in 
incidental allusions, or in occasional serious 
discussions of questions which are disturb- 
ing the faith of many Christians, he is bound 
to say only what he can say sincerely. 

The minister of the gospel is tempted to 
insincerity in his utterances, not only in re- 
gard to Christian dogma, but also in re- 
gard to his personal feelings. How easily 
one is tempted in a funeral address to try to 
express in language and in tone and manner 
an emotion of sympathetic grief which seems 

79 



ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS 

appropriate but which as a matter of fact 
the speaker does not feel! How easy it is, 
in speaking of the solemn truths of religion, 
to try to exhibit to the audience a degree of 
emotion which the speaker does not at the 
moment feel, however fitting that emotion 
might seem to be. It is worth while inci- 
dentally to express the conviction that the 
simulation of emotion is for the preacher as 
bad rhetorically as it is ethically. Feelings 
must fluctuate, with changes in our general 
mental and physical condition and in our en- 
vironment. The sincere, though it may be 
unimpassioned, statement of profound con- 
victions means more than any transient glow 
of feeling, even if the feeling is genuine. 
We have need, with all our hearts, to say 
"Amen" to the prayer of the Master, "Sanc- 
tify them in the truth." Only in the truth 
can we be sanctified. Only through the 
utterance of the truth can we be the means 
of the sanctification of others. 

I cannot help thinking that it would be 
a distinct gain to the ethical as well as to 
the intellectual standing of the clergy, if 
every man who enters the ministry had done 
some considerable amount of laboratory 

80 



LESSONS OF SCIENCE 

work in some department of science, so as 
to acquire the power of exact observation 
and absolutely truthful description, and had 
associated with scientific workers sufficiently 
to feel the influence of the scientific habit in 
cultivating the sense of veracity. 

I pass to another phase of the subject, 
which will require more extended considera- 
tion, namely, the bearing of scientific facts 
and theories upon religious beliefs. 

Theists of every age and of every variety 
of opinion have believed that some evidence 
of the existence of God could be found in 
the phenomena of the material universe. As 
Paul declares in the Epistle to the Romans, 
"The invisible things of him since the crea- 
tion of the world are clearly seen, being per- 
ceived through the things that are made, 
even his everlasting power and divinity." 
On the one hand, every man has a conscious- 
ness of his own personal acts of volition, and 
an experience of movements, primarily of 
his own body, secondarily of external ob- 
jects, which seem to him to be the result of 
his own volition. On the other hand, every 
man has the experience of movements in 
81 



ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS 

the external universe which produce im- 
pressions upon himself. The suggestion is 
a natural one that the movements of material 
objects which produce an effect upon him 
have their cause in the volition of a being or 
beings more or less similar to himself. This 
I take to be the origin of the belief in a per- 
sonal God or in personal gods, which has 
prevailed so widely in the human race. The 
question arises, How far is that primitive 
and naive assumption of volition as the 
cause of all movements in nature justified by 
a more exact and methodical study of 
nature? 

Even in my boyhood my thoughts were 
already busy with questions bearing on the 
relation of science and religion. Before I 
entered college I had read Hitchcock's Reli- 
gion of Geology and Miller's Testimony of 
the Rocks. I was intensely interested in 
those books, and my thinking was deeply im- 
pressed by them. Through Miller I came 
to know at second hand somewhat of the 
contribution which Thomas Chalmers had 
made to natural theology. In my student 
days I believed that the science of geology, 
which was then still looked upon with fear 
82 



LESSONS OF SCIENCE 

and aversion by many religious people, was 
capable of affording almost demonstrative 
evidence of the existence of God. 

Since an uncaused beginning is unthink- 
able, we must suppose that the universe was 
either created or eternal. The metaphysi- 
cal arguments against the eternity of the 
universe probably never convinced anybody 
with the exception of their authors. But 
Chalmers proposed to leave unanswered the 
question of the eternity of matter, and base 
the argument for the existence of God on 
the collocations of matter, which certainly 
are not eternal. From this point of de- 
parture, the argument for the existence of 
a Creator was based especially upon the 
existence of plants and animals. Geology 
proves beyond reasonable doubt that there 
was a time when the earth was lifeless, and 
that the present races of plants and animals 
made their first appearance within a time 
which is not only finite but very short in 
comparison with the whole duration of the 
earth. When Chalmers wrote, there was no 
natural process known whereby a new 
species of plant or animal could be origi- 
nated. The theories of Lamarck and of the 
83 



ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS 

anonymous author of "Vestiges of Creation" 
were as utterly discredited as the evolution- 
ary dreams of classical philosophers. Every- 
body supposed that the dictum of Linnaeus 
must be accepted as absolute truth, "Species 
tot sunt quot diversas formas ab initio pro- 
duooit Infinitum Ens" If, then, multitudes 
of species of plants and animals originated 
at a comparatively recent time, their origin 
could be attributed only to the direct action 
of creative will. The origin of new species 
was naturally spoken of as miraculous, not 
exactly in the theological sense, but in a sense 
closely analogous. I entered upon my life- 
work, therefore, with a confident belief that 
the science which I was to teach afforded 
something very near to a demonstration of 
theistic doctrine. 

While I was accepting those views of 
Chalmers and Miller as the final settlement 
of the theistic problem, the epoch-making 
work of Darwin had started the great in- 
tellectual revolution which marked the 
middle of the nineteenth century. Darwin's 
theory was first announced in 1858, and The 
Origin of Species was published in 1859. 
During my college course, which ended in 

84 



LESSONS OF SCIENCE 

1865, I never heard Darwin or his theory 
mentioned by any of my teachers. I read 
his book with intense admiration in 1867, 
but it took me several years more to digest 
and assimilate the arguments of Darwin 
sufficiently to become an evolutionist. 

Darwin's discovery of natural selection 
was not, indeed, a complete solution of the 
problem of organic evolution. It did, how- 
ever, show that there are processes actually 
going on in nature such as would under 
reasonably supposable conditions result in 
so wide divergence of offspring from the 
character of the parent stock as to con- 
stitute a new species. In the light of that 
principle, which showed how variation, in- 
stead of being merely oscillatory, could at 
times become progressive, naturalists were 
ready, as they had not been before, to read 
and interpret the innumerable suggestions 
of evolution in the structures of every organ- 
ism and in the relations of organisms to 
each other and to space and time. In a few 
years the doctrine of evolution came to be 
accepted with substantial unanimity by all 
classes of naturalists, and after the lapse of 
a somewhat longer time the belief of scien- 
85 



ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS 

tific specialists came to be adopted into the 
general thought of humanity. 

Darwin's epoch-making discovery was 
concerned merely with the origin of a species 
by descent with modification from a pre- 
existent species. It had no bearing upon the 
origin of life. But in scientific thought 
analogy goes far beyond the conclusions 
established by cogent induction. While we 
have at most only the faintest gleams of 
light in regard to the processes by which 
non-living matter first came to be living, 
scientists believe, on the force of general 
analogy, that the transition was probably 
made by some evolutionary process. We 
cannot believe that the chain of evolutionary 
progress from the nebula to man was broken 
at the point of the origin of life. Nor can 
we accept the nebula as an ultimate fact. 
However vague may be our knowledge of 
the nature of the nebula from which the 
solar system was derived, or of the proc- 
esses in which that nebula originated, we 
are constrained by analogy to believe that 
the nebula itself was evolved. By that same 
path of analogy, scientific men in general 
were led to believe that the various kinds of 
86 



LESSONS OF SCIENCE 

chemical atoms were the result of some sort 
of evolutionary process, instead of being 
created once for all changeless and indis- 
soluble; and the belief which was based on 
analogy has found confirmation in the mar- 
velous revelations of radioactivity, which 
have shown the atom of uranium breaking 
up into atoms of helium and lead. There is 
no rational stopping place this side of the 
conception of creative power and intelligence 
eternally immanent in an eternal universe. 

Of course the supposed demonstration of 
Chalmers and Miller has vanished. Nor 
can we fail to recognize that the argument 
from design for the existence of God, in 
the form in which it was presented by Paley 
and his followers, has been seriously dam- 
aged by the theory of evolution. Paley 
found, as he supposed, the strongest evi- 
dence of design in the mutual adaptation 
of the parts of a complex organism. A 
typical illustration of this line of argument 
is seen in the eye, whose performance as an 
organ of vision depends upon an approxi- 
mately perfect adaptation of the curved sur- 
faces and refractive indices of the series of 
transparent media through which the ray of 
87 



ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS 

light passes before it reaches the retina. 
Moreover, in addition to the essential parts 
of the eye, there are the various accessory 
parts by which vision is directed to different 
points, refractive power is changed in ac- 
commodation to the different distances of 
objects, and the delicate organ is protected 
from the chances of injury. Certainly, the 
Paleyan argument is considerably shattered 
when we have learned that the earliest form 
of eye was simply a nerve-ending on the 
surface of the body, covered by a fleck of 
pigment more absorptive of radiant energy 
than the general integument; and that the 
eyes of the higher forms of life have gradu- 
ally been evolved from that simpler form, 
in large part by the action of natural selec- 
tion in preserving desirable variations and 
causing the extinction of undesirable varia- 
tions. A homely illustration may serve to 
show how the Paleyan argument is affected 
by evolution. If we find a vessel almost 
perfectly filled with a variety of objects, the 
salient angles of one object fitting into re- 
entrant angles around it, so that the amount 
of space left vacant is utterly insignificant, 
the supposition would be a reasonable one 

88 



LESSONS OF SCIENCE 

that some one had intended the vessel to be 
nearly full; but, if, in the method of the 
Paleyan natural theology, we should argue 
from the curious and complex form of a 
single object that every angle and curve of 
its surface had been designed for the pur- 
pose of filling the space in which it was 
found, our conclusion would be rather dis- 
turbed if we learned that the vessel had been 
shaken until the small objects had rattled 
into the chinks between the large ones and 
the hard objects had impressed their shape 
upon the soft ones. The argument for the 
existence of God from the material universe 
must be based, not on the evidence afforded 
by the approximately perfect adaptation of 
minute details, but by the intellectuality of 
nature as viewed in its larger relations. A 
book which we can read is the work of an 
intelligence in some sense kindred with our 
own. The intelligibility of nature to human 
thought, is the evidence of the divine thought 
which nature expresses. 

There is a profound ethical impressive- 
ness in the sublime idea of the divine im- 
manence in an eternal universe. We no 
longer have to conceive of the Deity spend- 

89 



ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS 

ing a solitary eternity in the contemplation 
of his own attributes like a Hindoo Brahm, 
or, as some theologians have imagined, find- 
ing his delight in the mutual affection of the 
persons of the Trinity ; then creating a uni- 
verse by a single fiat, and abandoning it to 
run its own course by self-subsisting laws 
and forces; and subsequently only occasion- 
ally interposing to produce some extraordi- 
nary effect, as, for instance, in the origin of 
life or in the origin of human intelligence. 
The God we worship to-day is not the God 
of supposed gaps in the continuity of nature, 
but the God of the continuity of nature. 
Thus all nature becomes sacred with a divine 
presence. 

"We lack but open eye and ear 
To find the Orient's marvels here; 
The still small voice in autumn's hush, 
Yon maple wood the burning bush." 

We must recognize, indeed, that in large 
degree the ethical impression of the divine 
immanence is felt by some scientific men 
who do not profess a theistic belief. In one 
sense there is, indeed, very little difference 
between some of the theism and some of 
the atheism or pantheism of our time. The 
90 



LESSONS OF SCIENCE 

naive anthropomorphism of the Old Testa- 
ment and the still grosser anthropomor- 
phism of John Milton have vanished from 
our theological thought. If we say we be- 
lieve in the personality of God, we can, 
strictly speaking, mean nothing more than 
that, in the nature of Him who dwells "in 
light unapproachable, whom no man hath 
seen nor can see," there is something of which 
the fittest symbol our experience can offer is 
found in human personality; and there are 
many thoughtful men who do not feel at 
liberty formally to profess our creed of the 
personality of God, who yet recognize with 
as profound a reverence as ours the mys- 
terious Power 

"Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man." 

Profoundly impressive is the idea which 
modern science gives us of the progress of 
nature to fuller and fuller expression of the 
divine thought. The processes which are 
common to all organic life are developed in 
man into spiritual significance; first the 
natural, after that the spiritual. The two 

91 



ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS 

characteristic processes of all organic life 
are nutrition and reproduction. Each of 
these in man takes on a spiritual significance. 
When the Pithecanthropus or some other 
ancestor of man gathered his mate and his 
cubs around him to eat together the prey 
which he had captured, instead of gnawing 
the bones alone, a step had been taken in 
the development of human civilization. The 
social meal for the family, the group of 
friends, or the society of persons of kindred 
thought and purpose, has been an important 
factor in the progress of human civilization. 
Whether in the desert tent of the Bedouin 
or in the banquet hall of an august society, 
the social meal is the bond of union among 
men. In the sacred symbolism of our reli- 
gion, the form of a social meal celebrates the 
union of the saints of all lands and of all 
ages in holy fellowship with the Divine Mas- 
ter. From the simplest form of organic re- 
production, from the conjugation of two 
unicellular organisms — cells to which imagi- 
nation can hardly attribute a rudiment of 
consciousness, and which present no differ- 
ences from each other which we can recog- 
nize as sexual — mutually blending their con- 

92 



LESSONS OF SCIENCE 

tents and developing a swarm of spores, — it 
is a long journey to the sweet sanctities of 
the Christian home. But no less real is the 
unity of the process of reproduction through 
all grades of life, vegetable and animal. A 
striking illustration of the spiritual signifi- 
cance of reproduction is found in the sug- 
gestion of which John Fiske was the author, 
that the evolution of the moral and social 
characteristics of man was largely the result 
of the lengthened period of helpless infancy 
in the human species. That thought, first 
suggested by Fiske, has been developed with 
marvelous beauty in Henry Drummond's 
Ascent of Man, in the two chapters entitled, 
respectively, "The Evolution of a Mother," 
and "The Evolution of a Father." 

The ethical and religious significance of 
nature comes to revelation in man; only 
when the prophecy of the ages finds its ful- 
filment can we understand its meaning. 
The doctrines of evolution and conservation 
of energy, the characteristic ideas of the 
second half of the nineteenth century, im- 
pressed upon the mind of humanity the sub- 
lime conception of the unity of nature. 
That conception led naturally to an attempt 
93 



ETHICAL AND RELIGIOUS 

to interpret all phenomena in terms of mat- 
ter and motion under the action of purely 
physical and chemical forces. The reductio 
ad absurdum of that tendency is shown in the 
gross materialism of Karl Vogt's dictum: 
that it is the function of the brain to produce 
thought, as it is the function of muscles to 
contract, and the function of the kidneys to 
secrete urine. If that proposition means 
anything, it means that thought is either a 
form of matter or a form of motion, and 
it is difficult to say which alternative is 
the more absurd. In the frank recognition 
of those facts of human experience which 
cannot be formulated in terms of mass and 
velocity, lies the supreme evidence of God. 
The God who is veiled in nature is revealed 
in man. The really fundamental doctrine 
of religion is the personality of man. For 
him who genuinely believes in human per- 
sonality, the conception of the personality 
of God is a pretty easy corollary. 

The ethical significance of nature is re- 
vealed in man, the culmination of nature; 
the ethical significance of man is revealed in 
Christ, the ideal man. If I were to name 
the peculiar quality which characterizes 
94 



LESSONS OF SCIENCE 

Christian character, as distinct from the 
character which is morally clean but un- 
touched by the influence of Christian revela- 
tion, I should be disposed to use the old 
Methodist phrase, "conviction of sin." 
Ethical conceptions grow deeper and higher 
in the light of the teaching and character of 
Jesus. The soul that has learned in the 
school of Jesus is not satisfied with right 
conduct, but aspires after a harmony of soul 
with God. When Job had the vision of 
Jehovah and heard his voice out of the whirl- 
wind, his boastful self-satisfaction vanished, 
and he cried out, "I abhor myself, and re- 
pent in dust and ashes." The vision of God 
in Christ and the divine tenderness of his 
voice lead us to the humiliation and peni- 
tence out of which blooms 

". . . The white flower of a blameless life." 

This intense conviction of sin expresses it- 
self continually in the writings of Christian 
poets, as, for instance, in Tennyson's words, 

"Forgive what seemed my sin in me, 

What seemed my worth since I began, 
For merit lives from man to man, 
And not from man, O Lord, to thee." 
95 



LESSONS OF SCIENCE 

It is to the poor in spirit, to those that 
mourn, to the meek, to those who hunger 
and thirst after a righteousness not yet pos- 
sessed, that Jesus gives his blessing. 

Professor Hyde's friends are in many re- 
spects as good as the Reverend Doctor 
Jekyll's. They are clean in word and deed. 
They are just and generous. I would trust 
my money, my life, and my reputation, to 
the protection of one of my sets of friends 
as willingly as to that of the other. The 
unselfish love of truth which I find in scien- 
tific men commands my admiration. They 
show a severer truthfulness, as I have al- 
ready said frankly, but I trust not unkindly, 
than I find in the average of ministers of 
the gospel. They would make good martyrs. 
Science has had its martyrs in the past, and 
there is plenty of martyr stuff among the 
devotees of science to-day. But still I feel 
that there is something lacking. Integrity 
is transfigured into holiness only when the 
soul in penitence and self-abasement gazes 
upon the divine radiance in the face of Jesus. 



96 



IV 

THE SACREDNESS OF HUMAN 
PERSONALITY 



THE SACREDNESS OF HUMAN 
PERSONALITY 

"And God said, Let us make man in our image, 
after our likeness: and let them have dominion 
over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the 
air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, 
and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon 
the earth. 

"So God created man in his own image, in the 
image of God created he him; male and female 
created he them." — Genesis 1. #6\ 27. 

The editor who compiled our present 
book of Genesis placed in the beginning of 
his work two narratives of creation. The 
first of them occupies the whole of the first 
chapter and the first three verses of the 
second chapter of Genesis. The second 
narrative begins with the fourth verse of 
the second chapter. The verses which have 
been read as the text stand near the end of 
the first of these narratives. 

The first of these narratives is the work 
of a much later time than the second, and 
represents a much more advanced state of 

99 



THE SACREDNESS OF 

Hebrew religious thought. The interval be- 
tween their dates of composition was prob- 
ably about three and a half centuries. The 
later narrative, which comes first in the ar- 
rangement of our present book of Genesis, 
is remarkably free from the naive and crass 
anthropomorphism which characterizes the 
earlier narrative. The image of clay molded 
by the hands of Jehovah and vivified by the 
divine breath breathed into its nostrils, the 
rib taken from the man for the manufac- 
ture of a woman, the garden planted by Je- 
hovah, and Jehovah's evening walk in the 
garden in the cool of the day, represent an 
order of conceptions which religious thought 
had outgrown before the date of the later 
narrative. Anthropomorphic, indeed, is that 
later narrative. All religious thought and 
language is more or less anthropomorphic, 
for every conception which the human mind 
can form of God is reached through the 
symbolism of human experience and action. 
But surely no anthropomorphic conception 
could be more sublime than that of the crea- 
tion of a universe in obedience to a progres- 
sive series of divine commands. "Let light 
be." "Let the waters bring forth." "Let 
100 



HUMAN PERSONALITY 

the earth bring forth." Thus is brought be- 
fore our minds the sublime conception of 
an orderly, progressive development of the 
material universe in fulfilment of the divine 
will. In our modern language, such an 
orderly, progressive manifestation of phe- 
nomena in the universe we call evolution. 

The final stage of this creative evolution 
is the appearance of a being in the image of 
God. We are told that God blessed these 
highest and noblest of his earthly creatures, 
and bade them to subdue the earth and to 
have dominion. That dominion man, in- 
deed, has exercised. Within limits, he domi- 
nates nature by his own thought, as all 
nature is dominated by the divine thought. 
He thinks God's thoughts after him, gradu- 
ally interpreting the riddles of nature. He 
aspires after spiritual communion with God, 
and claims an inheritance in God's im- 
mortality. 

The evidences of the evolutionary origin 
of man are the same that have compelled be- 
lief in the evolutionary origin of other 
species of organisms. There are certainly 
very few, if any, biologists or geologists 
who do not believe that man was descended 
101 



THE SACREDNESS OF 

from some type of anthropoid ape. In 
fact, we have at least a plausible conjec- 
ture as to the precise conditions which led 
to the evolution of man. As the climate 
grew gradually colder, in the age immedi- 
ately preceding the last great Glacial period, 
the forests in which the simian ancestors of 
man had lived an arboreal life, feeding upon 
the fruits of the trees, became less luxuriant, 
and the supply of food less abundant. 
Some of the descendants of these ancestors 
of man, it has been conjectured, adjusted 
themselves to the changing conditions by 
abandoning their arboreal life, living on the 
surface of the earth, where they stood and 
walked on two feet, changing their diet to 
one in part, at least, carnivorous, and de- 
veloping larger brains under the necessity 
of obtaining food in ways that required the 
exercise of a higher degree of intelligence. 

There is, indeed, a mystery in the evolu- 
tion from the brute creation of a being pos- 
sessed of language, science, art, civilization, 
ethics, and religion; as there is a mystery, 
in an earlier stage of the history of creation, 
in the evolution of vegetable and animal life 
from inorganic matter. In each case, with 
102 



HUMAN PERSONALITY 

our present knowledge the mystery is inr 
soluble. Yet there is one thought that 
pierces the darkness with a gleam of light. 
That illuminating principle is that the cause 
of evolution is not matter but indwelling 
Spirit. Matter, whether we conceive of it 
as eternal or as created, is not a self-sub- 
sisting entity. The material universe is only 
the thin and perfectly flexible garment of 
God. All material changes are only the ex- 
pression of the will of immanent Deity. In 
the light of that principle, though we can 
give no explanation of the process of the 
evolution of life or of the evolution of the 
human soul, we can be reconciled to the 
mystery, and can wait for fuller knowledge. 
But there is an easy way of disposing of 
a mystery, and that is to deny or ignore the 
facts which it is impossible to explain. I 
have heard of a man who saw a camel in 
a menagerie, never having known anything 
about the characteristics of the animal be- 
fore. The proportions of the creature — his 
long, ungainly legs, his clumsy, padded feet, 
the shapeless hump on his back — did not cor- 
respond at all with the man's conception of 
the appropriate symmetry of an animal 
103 



THE SACREDNESS OF 

body. After walking around the beast and 
viewing him from different standpoints, he 
summed up his conclusion in the proposi- 
tion, "There ain't no such animal." In a 
somewhat similar spirit, the materialistic 
philosophy of our time seeks to escape from 
the mystery of human existence by denying 
or ignoring everything in human experi- 
ence which cannot be formulated in terms 
of mass and velocity. So consciousness is 
said to be a mode of motion, and thought 
is said to be a secretion of the brain. All 
ethical distinctions are regarded as fictitious. 
Religion is only a dream. Man is only an 
animal; and natural selection, to which he 
owes his origin, is the only law which he is 
bound to obey. 

A most interesting exposition of this phi- 
losophy as held by many scientific men in 
Germany, and of its results in conduct, is 
given in an article by Vernon Kellogg in 
the Atlantic Monthly for August, 1917, 
under the title, "Headquarters Nights." 
According to this philosophy, man is the 
supreme product of animal evolution, and 
the Teutonic race is the supreme product of 
human evolution. That race has come to 
104 



HUMAN PERSONALITY 

be what it is by the principle of the survival 
of the fittest. The race need acknowledge 
no allegiance to any other law than the law 
to which it owes its origin. The world be- 
longs to the races that can take it and hold 
it. From that standpoint, our scientific 
German friends can contemplate the mas- 
sacre of Belgians and Poles with the same 
equanimity with which we regard the slaugh- 
ter of pigs and cows in the stock-yards of 
Chicago. The prevalence of this material- 
istic philosophy among the educated classes 
is undoubtedly in part the explanation of 
the horrible u schrecklichkeit" of which the 
Germans have been guilty. 

Surely, if we accept the implications of 
the declaration that man was made in the 
image of God, we cannot make the principle 
of natural selection the ethical standard in 
human relations. No "law of the jungle" 
can govern the mutual relations of beings 
who bear the divine image and count them- 
selves heirs of God's immortality. That 
conception invests every human personality 
with an inviolable sacredness. No individ- 
ual, no class, no sex, no nation, no race, has 
a right to exploit another simply for the 
105 



THE SACREDNESS OF 

benefit of the stronger. To use any human 
being as a toy or a tool is a crime. This 
doctrine of the equal sacredness of every 
human person is the foundation of democ- 
racy. 

But the religious life of no nation rises 
to the level of the loftiest utterances of its 
prophets. That Hebrew people whose an- 
cient Scriptures enshrined this majestic 
oracle of democracy, reveals too often in its 
history a conception of God as a tutelary 
tribal Deity. The lofty thought of Genesis 
was like a seed that had failed to germinate 
until it sprang into new life in the teaching 
of Jesus. When Jesus taught his disciples 
that prayer of all prayers, "Our Father who 
art in heaven," he made vital and fruitful the 
great truth that all men are brothers by vir- 
tue of their common relation to the heavenly 
Father. Jesus was the first true democrat. 
Our humanitarian civilization, with its 
emancipation of women, its abolition of 
slavery, its constitutional systems of repre- 
sentative government, its universal educa- 
tion, its hospitals and reformatories, its mis- 
sionary activities, is all the fruit of the con- 
ception of the sacredness of every human 
106 



HUMAN PERSONALITY 

personality, in that all mankind, as children 
of the heavenly Father, are made in the 
image of God. Yuan Shi Kai said to Bishop 
Bashford, "After you Christians came to 
China and went about preaching the father- 
hood of God and the brotherhood of man, 
despotism became forever impossible." 

Alas, that, within the pale of nominal 
Christianity, the conception of God the 
Father of all mankind has too often degen- 
erated into the old conception of a tutelary 
tribal God! The "Gott mit uns" of our 
German cousins has been rather below the 
level of the war-god of Joshua. We can 
hardly avoid the feeling that the "Gott mit 
uns" is in a considerable degree a renais- 
sance of the thunder-god of the old Teutonic 
mythology. Christian Germany has been 
practically no better than atheistic Ger- 
many, though it has formulated its conduct 
in somewhat different fashion. German 
theologians and pastors have defied the 
moral sense of mankind in their utterances 
and publications in regard to the war about 
as flagrantly as German scientists and phi- 
losophers. 

The purpose of our country in the war 
107 



THE SACREDNESS OF 

is formulated in the noble words of Presi- 
dent Wilson, "The world must be made safe 
for democracy." In great degree we have 
succeeded in the task. In April, 1917, in 
a report which was adopted by the New 
York East Conference of the Methodist 
Episcopal Church, I wrote these words: 
"The Czar has gone; the Kaisers must go. 
The only monarchs the new age can tolerate 
are those whose crowns are only symbols of 
national unity and whose decrees but regis- 
ter a nation's will." I knew not then how 
quickly or how completely those words 
would find fulfillment. The Hohenzollern 
dynasty, upon which rests the chief respon- 
sibility for the war, is overthrown, and we 
behold the United States of Germany rising 
on the ruins of the empire. The Hapsburg 
dynasty is gone, and the heterogeneous mass 
of Austria-Hungary is broken up into a 
group of independent republics. The 
crowns of kinglings and princelings have 
been falling like withered leaves in an 
autumn gale. Only nations which are re- 
publican in spirit, if not in form, can enter 
the great world confederacy beneath whose 
sway we may hope for universal peace. In 
108 



HUMAN PERSONALITY 

the reconstruction of the map of Europe, 
the rights, the feelings, the aspirations of 
nations long subjected to alien tyranny will 
be respected, and so far as possible those 
rights will be maintained and those aspira- 
tions will be fulfilled. We shall have, doubt- 
less, the republics of Poland and Czecho- 
slovakia and Jugo-Slavia; Alsace and 
Lorraine will be restored to France, and 
Italia Irredenta will find its redemption. 
The problem, however, of the reconstruction 
of national boundaries will not be an easy 
one, though its solution be attempted in 
the most altruistic spirit. There is an Ulster 
in every Ireland. There is no territory 
which can be circumscribed by any definite 
and intelligible boundaries, which does not 
include one or more districts the majority of 
whose population differs, in race, language, 
religion, traditions, and aspirations, from 
the people of the larger area within which it 
is included. So complex has been the result 
of migration and intermixture of nations in 
the centuries of European history, that the 
solution of the problem of boundaries can 
be at the best only approximate. But we 
may trust that right principles will govern 
109 



THE SACREDNESS OF 

that reconstruction. The time is past for- 
ever when human populations can be bought 
and sold like herds of cattle. 

Yes, autocracy has been overthrown; and 
we and our allies are proud of our function 
as the avenging angels who have overthrown 
the enemies of mankind. But are we worthy 
of that glorious mission to which we have 
been called? Is it only the Central Powers 
that have offended against the great princi- 
ple of Christian democracy? Have the 
rights of every individual and of every class 
been carefully regarded in the political and 
social and economic life of the nations that 
are now triumphant? Is the sacredness of 
every human personality practically recog- 
nized in our own country or in any of the 
countries which share with us the glory of 
the great triumph? I quote a striking pas- 
sage from an article by Wilbur Daniel 
Steele in the Atlantic Monthly for May, 
1918: 

"This war began so long ago, so long before 
Sarajevo, so long before 'balances of power' 
were thought of, so long before the 'provinces' 
were lost and won, before Bismarck and the lot 
of them were begotten, or their fathers. So many, 
110 



HUMAN PERSONALITY 

many years of questions put, and half-answers 
given in return. Questions, questions: questions 
of a power-loom in the North Counties ; questions 
of a mill-hand's lodging in one Manchester or 
another, of the weight of a head-tax in India, of 
a widow's mass for her dead in Spain; questions 
of a black man in the Congo, of an eighth-black 
man in New Orleans, of a Christian in Turkey, 
an Irishman in Dublin, a Jew in Moscow, a French 
cripple in the streets of Zabern; questions of an 
idiot sitting on a throne; questions of a girl ask- 
ing her vote on a Hyde Park rostrum, of a girl 
asking her price in the dark of a Chicago door- 
way: whole questions half-answered, hungry ques- 
tions half-fed, mutilated fag-ends of questions 
piling up and piling up year by year, decade 
after decade. Listen! There came a time when 
it wouldn't do, wouldn't do at all. There came a 
time when the son of all those questions stood 
up in the world, final, unequivocal, naked, devour- 
ing, saying: 'Now you shall answer me. You 
shall look me squarely in the face at last, and you 
shall look at nothing else; you shall take your 
hands out of your pockets and your tongues out 
of your cheeks, and no matter how long, no mat- 
ter what the blood and anguish of it, you shall 
answer me now with a whole answer — or perish !' " 

Let me suggest some of the problems 
111 



THE SACREDNESS OF 

which the spirit of a true democracy requires 
us to consider in our own country. 

One of the noblest fruits of Christianity 
has been the emancipation of women, and 
probably nowhere has that emancipation 
been so nearly accomplished, in the most 
important respects, as in our own country. 
America has long been spoken of as the 
paradise of women. But is our legislation 
in regard to vice, are the ethical standards 
maintained by public opinion, is our treat- 
ment of the poor victims of man's lust and 
greed, up to the requirement of the princi- 
ple that the personality of a woman is as 
sacred as that of a man? 

Does that principle of the equal sacred- 
ness of human personality require the ex- 
tension of the right of suffrage to women? 
The question of woman suffrage I do not 
purpose to discuss. So far as I can see, 
there is still some difference of opinion, not 
only among the best men, but also among 
the best women, on the question whether 
woman suffrage would be on the whole an 
advantage to the community. I only wish 
to point out that the admission of equal 
sacredness of rights does not logically re- 
112 



HUMAN PERSONALITY 

quire identity of function. Certainly, in 
many respects, the functions of women in 
society must be different from those of men. 
However heartily we may applaud the 
heroic patriotism which inspired those Rus- 
sian women in the "battalion of death," and 
which kept them faithful to their country 
when men had betrayed it, no right-minded 
person who thinks of what it means for a 
woman to bear arms and to share the ex- 
periences that must belong to the life of a 
soldier, can contemplate the entrance of 
women into an army with any other feeling 
than that of utter horror. One of the great 
anxieties which I feel in regard to the prob- 
able incidental results of the war through 
which we have passed, is precisely the fear 
that the scarcity of labor and the consequent 
forcing of women into a great many tasks 
hitherto performed by men will result in the 
permanent employment of women in oc- 
cupations which are unfavorable for the 
best development of womanhood. In the 
countries of Europe, where the destruction 
of manhood has been greater than in our 
own country, the peril to womanhood is 
greater. The principle of true democracy 
113 



THE SACREDNESS OF 

requires the recognition of the equal sacred- 
ness of the rights of all classes. It does not 
require identity of function of all classes. 
The question of woman suffrage must be 
decided on other grounds, and on that ques- 
tion I express no opinion. 

Take the problem of inferior races. That 
problem appears as a national problem in 
every country inhabited by two or more very 
different races. It presents itself also as an 
international problem. It is only a silly 
sentimentalism that can deny that some 
races are inferior to others. The race from 
which have come inflected speech and alpha- 
betic writing, the great classic literatures 
ancient and modern, the great philosophies, 
the revelations of science from Hipparchus 
and Aristotle to Newton and Darwin, the 
applications of science in the useful arts, the 
system of constitutional representative gov- 
ernment under which liberty is protected by 
law, the great missionary religions — that 
race can surely claim superiority to any 
other. China and Japan have taken at 
second hand a civilization which they had 
little share in making. In fact, I have a 
good deal of sympathy with the claim of our 
114 



HUMAN PERSONALITY 

German cousins that the whitest of the 
whites, the tall, long-headed, fair-skinned, 
tow-haired, and blue-eyed race of Northern 
Europe, the Teutonic or Nordic race, is the 
race which exhibits in greatest purity the 
highest stage of human development. 

In the past the too frequent procedure 
of the white race has been to exploit the 
inferior races if it could use them, and to 
destroy them if it did not see how to use 
them. Certainly there is very much in the 
conduct of the white race toward Indians, 
Negroes, and Mongolians in our own coun- 
try which no one can defend. 

But, with the best intentions, the prob- 
lem of the inferior races is one of tremen- 
dous difficulty. Some very simple solutions 
have been attempted. Our cousins in Aus- 
tralia have treated the aborigines of that 
continent with an inhumanity several shades 
worse than that Which we have shown to- 
ward the Indians. In Australia, as in the 
United States, the white race has taken pos- 
session of the land ; but in Australia the proc- 
ess has involved a good deal of systematic 
massacre. Only a remnant of the aborigines 
survives. In Tasmania the native popula- 
115 



THE SACREDNESS OF 

tion has become absolutely extinct. That 
solution of the problem is certainly simple, 
but simplicity is its only merit. Fifty 
years ago our fathers attempted a solution 
of one phase of the problem of inferior races 
which was equally simple. At the close of 
the Civil War our fathers gave manhood 
suffrage to the Negroes, though very many 
of them, under a thin veneer of Anglo- 
Saxon civilization, were essentially barbar- 
ians. Our fathers trusted that giving these 
people political equality would immediately 
produce in them intellectual, moral, and 
social equality. The shameful story of car- 
pet-bagger rule in the Southern States 
showed the worthlessness of that simple 
solution. But how ought we to deal with a 
population in which two races of very differ- 
ent capacities are mingled? Impartial suf- 
frage for all races is all right in Connecticut. 
Would it seem to us equally satisfactory if 
we lived in South Carolina or Mississippi, 
where people of Negro race and of mixed 
race make up the majority? What would 
we think of manhood suffrage for the in- 
ferior race, if we lived in the South African 
Republic, where the English and Dutch to- 
116 



HUMAN PERSONALITY 

gether are approximately one sixth of the 
population, five sixths being Negro savages ? 
What ought we to do with the inferior races 
in the Philippine Islands? It is not my pur- 
pose to-day to answer these questions, but 
only to point out the two guiding principles. 
On the one hand the superior race must not 
simply exploit the inferior race. Their 
rights are as sacred as those of the stronger 
and wiser. But equal sacredness of right 
does not mean identity of function in society. 
Take the economic problem. Is our in- 
dustrial system truly democratic? Or do we 
still find the laboring classes in large degree 
exploited by the capitalists? Of course so- 
ciety must protect itself, and we cannot 
tolerate the crimes of the I. W. W. We 
must imprison many of them, and every now 
and then we must hang a few of them; but 
we must reform the conditions out of which 
the I. W. W. has been evolved. At the 
present time, skilled laborers, by organiza- 
tion in trade-unions and by collective bar- 
gaining, are able to secure for themselves 
pretty good wages and pretty good condi- 
tions of employment. In the last year the 
extreme scarcity of laborers has raised to a 
117 



THE SACREDNESS OF 

high figure the wages even of the unskilled; 
but in ordinary times the condition of un- 
skilled laborers is little better than that of 
slaves. In fact, in some ways the condition 
of the unskilled laborer may be even worse 
than if he were a slave. It is for the in- 
terest of the owner to preserve the life of a 
slave, for, if the slave dies, he must buy an- 
other. When the supply of unskilled labor- 
ers exceeds the demand, the death of a 
laborer is no loss to the employer. He can 
fill the place with no pecuniary loss and 
with little inconvenience. It is obviously 
true in general that the wage system is an 
improvement upon the system of slavery, in 
which the laborer was a piece of property, 
or the system of serfdom, in which the peas- 
ant was an appurtenance of the land. But 
I cannot believe that a system which af- 
fords occasion for so continuous antagonism 
between employer and employee is the last 
word of economic science in regard to in- 
dustrial organization. 

Not only in the industrial system of a 

single country do we find problems which 

must be treated in the light of the great 

principle of democracy, but also in interna- 

118 



HUMAN PERSONALITY 

tional relations. Each country frames its 
system of tariffs and its immigration laws 
primarily with reference to its own interests. 
But has our nation or any nation a right to 
legislate to secure its own advantage at cost 
of obvious injury to the populations of other 
countries? While seeking primarily the im- 
provement of social and economic conditions 
in our own land, are we not bound to re- 
gard the welfare of peoples beyond the 
seas? 

I have suggested questions which I have 
not answered. Some of them will not be 
answered satisfactorily in the immediate 
future. Wiser men in years to come must 
seek in the fear of God to find their full 
solution. My present object is only to em- 
phasize that fundamental truth, that no an- 
swer to these questions will be the right an- 
swer, and no answer to these questions can 
receive the permanent assent of humanity, 
which is not based upon the principle of the 
inviolable sacredness of every human per- 
sonality. The full recognition of that prin- 
ciple will require some sacrifice on the part 
of the strong for the benefit of the weak. 
We must be willing to yield somewhat of our 
119 



HUMAN PERSONALITY 

privileges and immunities. We must think 
and speak less of our rights and more of 
our duties. Only those who enter into the 
spirit of the first true Democrat, the spirit 
of Him who lived and died for all humanity, 
male and female, Jew and Gentile, white, 
yellow, red, brown, and black — only those 
are fit to lead mankind, out of the horror 
of war and the misery of oppression, into 
the promised land of freedom and brother- 
hood, into the "new earth wherein dwelleth 
righteousness." 



120 



THE NEW TESTAMENT OF 
TO-DAY 



THE NEW TESTAMENT OF 
TO-DAY 1 

The theme to be considered at this time 
is not the ultimate New Testament but the 
New Testament of to-day. I know some- 
thing of what the New Testament was five 
and thirty years ago when I became a mem- 
ber of this Conference. I know something 
of what the New Testament is to-day. I 
am neither a prophet nor a prophet's son, 
and I know not what the New Testament 
will be to the church of future centuries. 

Our conception of the New Testament 
has been changed by what we may call the 
lower criticism. The Greek text has been 
revised, and we know much more nearly than 
we knew a few decades ago what the origi- 
nal writers of the books of the New Testa- 
ment intended to say. We have not only 
a more trustworthy Greek text, but we have 
a far better translation into English than 

1 Address before the Mid-year Assembly of the New York 
East Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1905. 

123 



THE NEW TESTAMENT 

we had a few decades ago. I doubt whether 
there was ever so thoroughly accurate a 
translation of an important work into any 
language as we possess in the American Re- 
vision of the New Testament. 

Some changes which have been made by 
correction either of the text or of the trans- 
lation are surely very welcome. We are 
quite willing to learn that the superstitious 
story of the angel coming down and troub- 
ling the water of the pool of Bethesda is 
an interpolation. We are quite willing, in 
Peter's speech reported in the third chapter 
of Acts, to find him exhorting men to re- 
pent, not "when the times of refreshing shall 
come from the presence of the Lord," but 
"that so there may come seasons of refresh- 
ing from the presence of the Lord." Thus, 
of two passages of Scripture with which men 
have perhaps half sincerely quieted their 
consciences in postponing the duty of a 
Christian life until some time of revival, it 
is interesting to find that one is an inter- 
polation in the text and the other is a pal- 
pable error of translation. A new depth 
of insight into the principles of the divine 
government is given us when, in Mark 3. 
124 



OF TO-DAY 

29, we read, "is guilty of an eternal sin," 
instead of the old reading, "is in danger of 
eternal damnation." Some changes re- 
quired by critical scholarship are not quite 
so welcome. The story of the woman taken 
in adultery gives a strangely beautiful reve- 
lation of the character of Jesus, and we 
would like to believe that the story is true. 
Very likely, indeed, it is true, but I suppose 
it is substantially certain that it is no part 
of the Fourth Gospel. Some extreme trini- 
tarians may regret the vanishing of the three 
heavenly witnesses from the text of 1 John 
5. 7; but a phrase which appears in no manu- 
script earlier than the sixteenth century we 
may be sure is no part of the original text. 
Many of us rather miss the doxology with 
which the Lord's prayer closes; but the re- 
moval of that doxology from the New Testa- 
ment need do us no harm, for we can use in 
our worship, so far as we see fit, the liturgical 
treasures of all ages. 

The New Testament has been more 
changed to our apprehension by the higher 
criticism, the investigation of the date and 
the authorship of the respective books. In 
this respect there is, indeed, a very marked 
125 



s/ 



THE NEW TESTAMENT 

difference between the Old and the New 
Testament. Criticism has shown that the 
traditional opinions in regard to the date 
and authorship of the books of the Old 
Testament are mostly erroneous, while in 
regard to the New Testament a good share 
of the traditional opinions are exactly or 
approximately true. This difference we 
might reasonably have expected. The books 
of the New Testament, with one or two ex- 
ceptions, were probably all written within 
the space of a few decades, and that in an 
age of comparatively high civilization. 
Under those conditions we might reason- 
ably suppose that to a considerable extent 
tradition would hand down a true story as 
to the date and authorship of the books. 
Enough of the New Testament was pro- 
duced within a few decades after the public 
ministry and teaching, the death and resur- 
rection, of Jesus, to afford a material con- 
firmation to our belief in the historic basis 
of Christianity. George John Romanes 
mentions as one of the causes of his loss of 
faith in Christianity the notion that the date 
and origin of its sacred books were so un- 
certain as to deprive them of all evidential 
126 



OF TO-DAY 

value ; and he gives as one of the grounds of 
his return to faith the conviction which he 
had reached that Paul's Epistles to the 
Romans, Corinthians, and Galatians are 
proved beyond reasonable doubt to be gen- 
uine, and that the Synoptic Gospels were 
certainly in possession of the churches be- 
fore the close of the first century. The case 
of Romanes is typical of the intellectual life 
of the second half of the nineteenth cen- 
tury, not only in the fact of loss and re- 
covery of faith, but in large degree in the 
reasons of that loss and recovery. If we 
can accept the four great Epistles of Paul 
as genuine, and the Synoptic Gospels as 
somewhat nearly contemporaneous narra- 
tives of the life and work of Jesus, that is 
enough to show that our conception of the 
life and character and teaching of Jesus is 
substantially the same as that of the primi- 
tive Christian Church. 

While the acceptance of those seven books 
would give us enough of the New Testament 
for a basis of Christian faith, I believe that 
we may reasonably accept considerably 
more. I am not blind to the serious diffi- 
culties which the hypothesis of the Johan- 
127 



THE NEW TESTAMENT 

nean authorship of the Fourth Gospel en- 
counters; and yet each time I reexamine 
the question my mind returns to the belief 
that the Johannean authorship is, on the 
whole, more probable than any alternative 
theory. The resemblance in style of the dis- 
courses of Jesus reported in that Gospel to 
the writer's own style as shown in other 
parts of the Gospel and in the First Epistle, 
has rightly been attributed to the assimila- 
tion of the words of Jesus to the author's 
own habit of thought and expression. Yet I 
believe we must recognize an assimilation in 
the opposite direction. If the Fourth Gos- 
pel makes Jesus speak like John, it is no 
less true that, in the half-century in which 
John had been lovingly brooding over the 
memory of the Master's words, he had come 
unconsciously to think and to speak like 
Jesus. The question of the authorship of 
the Apocalypse is closely bound up with 
the question of the date of the book. If we 
can put it at the time of the Neronian per- 
secution, it is not difficult to imagine the 
mind of one author passing in a quarter of 
a century through such changes as would 
render possible the production of two books 
128 



OF TO-DAY 

so different, alike in type of thought and 
in mode of expression, as the Fourth Gos- 
pel and the Apocalypse. Especially might 
such a transformation be possible if, within 
that quarter-century, occurred the destruc- 
tion of Jerusalem and the consequent eman- 
cipation of the mind of the church from the 
bonds of Judaism. It seems inconceivable 
that the same man could have written both 
books about the same time and in the same 
stage of his intellectual and spiritual de- 
velopment. I think we may reasonably re- 
gard all the Epistles which commonly bear 
the name of Paul as genuine, with, of course, 
the exception of the Epistle to the He- 
brews, in regard to whose authorship we 
only know that the author was not Paul. 
The one book of the New Testament in re- 
gard to which it is substantially certain that 
it does not belong to the apostolic age is the 
so-called Second Epistle of Peter. 

But there are still deeper questions than 
those relating to the date and authorship of 
the books. If there is a lower criticism and 
a higher criticism, there is also, if we may 
use the expression, a highest criticism. Our 
views have changed in regard to the general 
129 



THE NEW TESTAMENT 

character of the books of the New Testa- 
ment, the nature and scope of inspiration, 
and the degree in which we can predicate 
authority as inhering in the books. 

Thirty-five years ago the New Testa- 
ment and the Old alike were habitually 
treated by preachers and theologians as a 
mosaic of proof -texts. I remember, when 
I was admitted to this Conference, one of 
the requirements for orders as a local dea- 
con was that the candidate should be able 
to state the doctrines of Christianity and to 
support each doctrine by proof -texts. The 
Discipline of those days advised the candi- 
date to prepare for this examination by 
reading the Bible through in course, and 
marking the verses which could suitably be 
quoted in favor of any particular doctrine. 
Such a procedure, of course, was based upon 
the assumption that a sentence from Joshua 
or Esther was just as valid proof of Chris- 
tian doctrine as a sentence from the Ser- 
mon on the Mount or from the farewell ad- 
dress of Jesus to his disciples. That non- 
sense we have happily left behind us. We 
have learned that the books of the Bible 
are to be interpreted on literary principles. 
130 



OF TO-DAY 

To understand any book we must more or 
less fully ensphere ourselves in the mental 
atmosphere in which the book was produced. 
We have learned that the writers of the 
New Testament were not amanuenses. We 
have learned to recognize the profound in- 
dividuality of some of the leading writers, 
manifesting itself not only in the literary 
style, but also in the mode of thought. We 
have learned that the theology of the New 
Testament was a gradual development. 
Not only are there differences in thought 
as well as in expression between the differ- 
ent writers, but, in those cases in which with 
more or less probability we believe that we 
have writings of the same author at different 
periods, we find more or less indication of 
changes in opinion and in habit of thought. 
The most striking example of this is in the 
case of John, if it be true, as some still be- 
lieve, that he was the author both of the 
Apocalypse and of the Fourth Gospel. It 
is no overstatement of the difference of tone 
between these two books to say that the 
Apocalypse is the most Jewish and the 
Fourth Gospel the least Jewish of all the 
books of the New Testament. The catas- 
131 



THE NEW TESTAMENT 

trophic ending of earthly things, which is 
the dominant thought of the Apocalypse, 
gives place in the Gospel to a progressive 
spiritual judgment. The vindictive spirit 
of the Apocalypse gives place to that sweet 
spirit of love which glorifies every page of 
the Gospel. Incidentally, it may be noted 
that, in the interval between the composition 
of these two books, if they were written by 
the same author, he learned to write a Greek 
style which was grammatically correct. In 
1 Cor. 7. 8 Paul distinctly advises widows 
not to remarry, while in 1 Timothy 5. 14 he 
as explicitly advises the younger widows to 
remarry. Obviously, the belief in the near- 
ness of the Parousia, on which much of the 
advice in the seventh chapter of First Corin- 
thians was based, Paul no longer held, 
when in the last years of his life he wrote the 
Pastoral Epistles. 

We have learned that the inspiration of 
the New Testament writers was not like the 
ecstasy which seized upon the Delphian 
priestess when she seated herself on her 
tripod. That seventh chapter of First 
Corinthians affords a very instructive reve- 
lation of Paul's own conception of the in- 
132 



OF TO-DAY 

spiration which he claimed. When he makes 
a distinction between some counsels which 
he gives on his own responsibility and others 
for which he claims the authority of the 
Lord Jesus, the distinction is not, as has 
sometimes been imagined, between the 
things which he said or wrote in a non-in- 
spirational condition, and other things which 
he said or wrote in an inspirational condi- 
tion. The things for which he claims the 
authority of the Lord Jesus are precisely the 
things in regard to which we have sayings 
of Jesus recorded in the Gospels. And when 
in the fortieth verse of that chapter he says, 
"I think that I also have the Spirit of God," 
he does not mean that he thinks he has the 
corroboration of divine inspiration for his 
opinions in addition to his own judgment, 
but, rather, that he, as well as other apostles 
and religious teachers, has the Spirit of God. 
Two things are manifest from this chapter 
in regard to Paul's conception of inspira- 
tion. Inspiration was not a mysterious ex- 
perience which seized upon him when he sat 
down to write or dictate an epistle, but an 
abiding presence of the Divine Spirit, which 
guided all his conduct and ennobled his life ; 
133 



THE NEW TESTAMENT 

but no inspiration with which he or any- 
other apostle might be endowed, raised its 
possessor to an equality with the Master. 
The contrast of less and greater authority in 
regard to the counsels of the chapter is not 
the contrast between Paul uninspired and 
Paul inspired, but between Paul inspired 
and the Lord Jesus. 

Of course in this change in our general 
conception of the inspiration of the New 
Testament we have given up any idea of in- 
errancy. It is a great relief not to have to 
harmonize conflicting statements in the New 
Testament. If Matthew tells us that Jesus 
healed two blind men on leaving Jericho, 
Mark that he healed one blind man on leav- 
ing Jericho, and Luke that he healed one 
blind man on entering Jericho, we no longer 
feel bound to harmonize the three narratives 
by the assumption that he healed one blind 
man on entering and two on leaving Jericho. 
We are perfectly content to say that we do 
not care whether there was one blind man 
or two, and whether the healing was done 
on entering or on leaving Jericho. If the 
Synoptic Gospels appear to put the Pass- 
over on Thursday of the Passion Week, and 
134 



OF TO-DAY 

John appears to put it on Friday of that 
week, we are perfectly at liberty to inquire 
which arrangement of the chronology is 
right, and which is wrong ; and we do not feel 
bound to believe that both chronological 
schemes are infallibly true. We are no 
longer troubled by the very conspicuous 
references in Paul's earlier Epistles to his 
expectation of the Parousia as destined to 
come in his own lifetime. We do not feel 
bound to maintain the validity of Paul's 
argument from the singular number of the 
noun translated "seed" in Gal. 3. 16, but we 
feel ourselves perfectly at liberty to assent 
to the suggestion of Saint Jerome that 
Paul's argument was addressed to the "fool- 
ish Galatians," and was worthy of the per- 
sons to whom it was addressed. We are 
very willing to be relieved from the obliga- 
tion of following Paul, when he asserts that 
women are to be in eternal subjection be- 
cause, according to the Eden story, Adam 
was first formed, then Eve, and the woman 
was created for the man. 

But we must recognize clearly that the 
effect of the abandonment of the notion of 
inerrancy cannot be limited to historical de- 
135 



THE NEW TESTAMENT 

tails and opinions outside of the realm of 
theological dogma. We can predicate no 
inerrancy for the theological opinions of the 
New Testament writers. 

The kenosis theory of the person of Christ 
owes its name, and probably in considerable 
part the conception which the name repre- 
sents, to Paul's words in Phil. 2. 6, 7: "Who, 
existing in the form of God, counted not 
the being on an equality with God a thing 
to be grasped, but emptied (enevuoev) him- 
self, taking the form of a servant, coming 
to be in the likeness of men." Now, if Paul 
was inerrant in his views of theological 
dogma, we must accept as true whatever he 
meant to teach by that word eicevuoev, how- 
ever difficult it may be for us to enter into 
his conception, and however difficult it 
may be to harmonize that conception with 
other New Testament representations of 
the nature of Christ, as, for instance, with 
the "reflection" (a-navyaaiia) of God's glory 
and the "impress" (xapaicTTjp) of his substance 
in Heb. 1. 3. But, if Paul's philosophy of 
Christianity was only that of a man pos- 
sessed of lofty spiritual insight, we are at 
liberty, whatever Paul may have meant to 
136 



OF TO-DAY 

say, to have our own opinion as to the pos- 
sibility of an omniscient Being divesting 
himself of omniscience by an act of volition, 
as is assumed in the kenosis theory. 

We must come to recognize that a theo- 
logical science has no more been revealed by 
inerrant inspiration than a geological or 
astronomical science. Theology in every 
age is a human attempt to formulate divine 
truth. The theologies of Paul and John 
and other New Testament writers are no ex- 
ception. 

Obviously, the church must be content 
with less definite creeds. With no inerrant 
dogmatic theology, there is no place for 
dogmatism. The truth will remain that 
"God was in Christ, reconciling the world 
unto himself," but the mystery of that 
divine indwelling in Jesus has never been 
formulated in any inerrant theology. And 
we must recognize as merely tentative any 
formulation which we can make to-day. 
Whittier's hymn, "Our Master," speaks to 
the heart of this age as the Athanasian Creed 
fails to speak. 

God's revelation has come, primarily, not 
through a book, but through life — most of 
137 



THE NEW TESTAMENT 

all through the transcendent life of Jesus. 
"God, having of old time spoken unto the 
fathers in the prophets by divers portions 
and in divers manners, hath at the end of 
these days spoken unto us in his Son." The 
church was living and growing for fifty 
or sixty years before the greatest book 
of the New Testament was written, and 
much longer before the books supposed to 
be of apostolic authority were gathered into 
a canon. I suspect that Paul and John 
would have been astonished to find letters 
of personal friendship to Philemon and 
Gaius and the elect lady, whoever she may 
have been, included in the canon of au- 
thoritative Scripture. Even Paul's great 
Epistles to the Galatians, Corinthians, and 
Romans were written as tracts for the times, 
with no thought of writing a message to the 
church in distant centuries. Truly, he 
builded better than he knew, for in those 
epistles was the inspiration of a Lutheran 
Reformation and a Wesleyan Revival. 

The revelation of Christianity was in 

Christ himself — his life and teaching, his 

miracles, his death and resurrection, his 

character. No speech that he uttered may 

138 



OF TO-DAY 

have been reported with absolute accuracy. 
As he probably spoke in Aramaic and our 
record of his words is in Greek, the repre- 
sentation of his thought which we possess 
must be at the best imperfect. Legendary 
elements have mingled undoubtedly in 
greater or less degree in the traditions pre- 
served to us in the Gospels. And not all 
the opinions about Christ which were held 
and taught by the apostles and their com- 
panions may be true. Yet we can have a 
reasonable confidence that the New Testa- 
ment presents to us in its main outline a 
veracious picture of the life and character 
and teaching of Jesus. 

When all extravagant claims based on 
traditional doctrines of inspiration are 
abandoned, is it not true that we know Jesus 
to-day better than his contemporaries could 
know him? Each Gospel and each Epistle 
throws upon the theme some rays of colored 
light. To-day, more fully than at any 
former period, we can blend those colored 
lights into the white light of truth. Ethical 
and religious conceptions which were too 
novel for the contemporaries of Jesus to 
understand, are intelligible in that intellec- 
139 



THE NEW TESTAMENT 

tual atmosphere which he has created. 
Nineteen centuries of Christendom form an 
illuminating commentary on the lif e and 
words of Jesus. 

In the New Testament, then, we see and 
hear Jesus. We know his sinless life. We 
see him as he went about doing good. We 
hear the oft-repeated motto in which he ex- 
pressed the spirit of his own life, that life is 
found only in losing life. In the supreme 
glory of self-sacrifice he stands a unique 
figure before the world. We hear from his 
lips the expression of infinite hate of sin and 
infinite love of the sinner, in tones in which 
the thunder of divine wrath blends in sweet 
accord with the wail of infinite pity. And 
we behold his life re-incarnating itself in his 
disciples. We behold the divine life con- 
quering Jewish bigotry and heathen im- 
morality, lifting men above the vices of 
paganism and of slavery, working in them 
the sacred hunger for righteousness, found- 
ing in individual souls the kingdom of 
heaven, till the individual Christian life 
multiplies itself into the composite life of a 
Christian civilization. 

I have said I know not what will be the 
140 



OF TO-DAY 

ultimate New Testament. I do not know 
what will be the last word on the question 
whether John 1. 18 should read, "only-be- 
gotten Son," or "only-begotten God." I 
know not what will be the final conclusion 
in regard to the authorship of Hebrews or 
Second Peter, or of the Johannean writings 
and some of the minor epistles commonly 
attributed to Paul ; I know not what will be 
the final form of opinion in regard to the 
sources and development of the Synoptic 
Gospels. I know not into what shape the 
reverent thought of future ages will cast the 
old doctrines of incarnation and atonement. 
But of this I feel sure, that to all the ages 
the New Testament will be the canvas on 
which the world will behold the lineaments 
of that face of Jesus, 

"Most human and yet most divine, 
The flower of man and God!" 

And, so long as that face beams upon 
humanity, the words to Philip will find per- 
petual fulfillment, "He that hath seen me 
hath seen the Father." 



14:1 



VI 

THE SABBATH AND THE LORD'S 
DAY 



VI 



THE SABBATH AND THE LORD'S 
DAY 

"In it thou shalt not do any work." — Exodus 
00. 10. 

"I was in the Spirit on the Lord's Day." — Reve- 
lation 1. 10, 

Of these two texts, one stands almost at 
the beginning, the other very near the end, 
in the traditional arrangement of the canon 
of the Old and the New Testament. The 
two texts are yet more remote in spirit than 
in their places in the canon of Scripture. 
One speaks of an outward, the other of an 
inward life. One is essentially Jewish, the 
other is characteristically Christian. One 
speaks of a shadow that was destined to 
vanish away, the other tells us of the age- 
long heritage of the Christian Church. 

We have no clear evidence in Scripture 
of the observance of a Sabbath before the 
time of Moses. Very likely the observance 
145 



THE SABBATH AND 

of the Sabbath among the ancestors of the 
Jewish people may go back to an earlier 
date. There are indications that the Baby- 
lonians had a Sabbath, and the possibility 
is suggested that Hebrews and Babylonians 
inherited the institution from a common 
source. Human divisions of time are, in 
general, founded upon the apparent move- 
ments of the sun and the moon. For many 
purposes it is convenient to recognize a 
period of time longer than the solar day and 
shorter than the lunar month. Nothing is so 
natural or convenient for the fulfillment of 
that need as the division of the lunar month 
into halves and quarters. The recognition 
of a week as a division of time shows itself 
very widely among the different races of 
men. 

It is probable that the Sabbath as set 
forth in the Old Testament goes back at least 
to the time of Moses. The Sabbath precept, 
as given in Exod. 34. 21, is supposed to 
belong to the earliest of the Pentateuchal 
documents, the Jahvistic narrative. The 
Decalogue, as given in Exod. 20, is referred 
to the Elohistic narrative, a century later. 
It is, however, believed that the earliest form 
146 



THE LORD'S DAY 

of the Decalogue was short and simple, the 
reasons given for several of the precepts hav- 
ing been added by later editors. In the 
Deuteronomic form of the Decalogue there 
is no reference to the notion of a divine rest 
at the close of the creative week, such as 
appears in the form given in Exodus, but 
the Sabbath rest is regarded as a celebration 
of the deliverance wrought by God for the 
Israelites from the bondage which they suf- 
fered in Egypt. The noble psalm of crea- 
tion which is preserved to us in the first chap- 
ter of Genesis divides the creative work into 
six stages followed by a period of rest. That 
poetic arrangement of the creative work was 
undoubtedly suggested by the existence of 
the institution of the Sabbath prior to the 
date of the psalm. In Exod. 31. 17 the 
divine rest appears in a form more grossly 
anthropomorphic, "He rested and was re- 
freshed." The idea of God needing rest 
like a tired workman and finding refresh- 
ment in it contrasts startlingly with the 
majestic utterance of Jesus, "My Father 
worketh hitherto." 

The Jewish Sabbath was indeed a day of 
restraint, and yet it was a day of joy. The 
147 



THE SABBATH AND 

characteristic idea of the day was freedom 
from grinding toil, and consequently oppor- 
tunity for social enjoyment. Jesus accepted 
an invitation to a feast in a Pharisee's house 
on the Sabbath ; and the idea of a social feast 
was alike in accord with the principles of the 
Pharisees and with those of Jesus himself. 
Even the fussiest and most ridiculous of 
Pharisaic prohibitions in regard to the Sab- 
bath, such as the exact prescription how 
great a distance one might walk, and what 
articles might be carried, on the Sabbath, 
had for their real significance the require- 
ment that nothing in the nature of servile 
toil should enter into the employments of 
the day. In contrast with the memory of 
Egyptian bondage, and in contrast with the 
severe toil which was then and always has 
been the lot of the poor on working days, 
the Sabbath was to be for every Israelite a 
day of emancipation from the burden of 
work. 

While Jesus treated with fit contempt the 
hedge of fussy traditions which Pharisaism 
had planted around the Sabbath precept, as 
around all other precepts of the law, it seems 
to be the fact that Jesus observed the Sab- 
148 



THE LORDS DAY 

bath in his own conduct according to its 
true spirit. In the Codex Bezse, a manu- 
script of the New Testament dating prob- 
ably from the fifth or sixth century, there 
is a strange interpolation in the sixth chap- 
ter of Luke: "On the same day, seeing some 
one working on the Sabbath, He said to 
him, 'Man, if thou knowest what thou doest 
thou art blessed, but if thou knowest not 
what thou doest thou art cursed and a trans- 
gressor of the law.' ' The words certainly 
have no claim to be considered an authentic 
part of the Gospel of Luke. They may or 
may not be founded upon the memory of 
some actual utterance of Jesus, in which he 
intimated that the form of Sabbath observ- 
ance would pass away when the ancient law 
should find in him its fulfillment. 

After the ascension Jewish Christians re- 
tained for a time the observance of the Sab- 
bath, as they retained other Jewish observ- 
ances. To some extent Gentile Christians 
imitated their Jewish brethren in this as in 
some other Jewish customs. The observ- 
ance of the Sabbath on the part of Gentile 
Christians is severely rebuked by Paul in 
Gal. 4. 10: "Ye observe days, and months, 
149 



THE SABBATH AND 

and seasons, and years." In the preceding 
verse he reproaches them for turning back 
"to the weak and beggarly rudiments, 
whereunto ye desire to be in bondage." In 
Col. 2. 16, he says, "Let no man therefore 
judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect 
of a feast day or a new moon or a Sabbath 
day: which are a shadow of the things to 
come." The words clearly mean that the 
Gentile Christian should observe the Sab- 
bath no more than the whole program of 
Jewish feasts and fasts. In writing to the 
church in Rome, which was composed in part 
of Gentile and in part of Jewish Christians, 
Paul says, "One man esteemeth one day 
above another, another esteemeth every 
day alike." He apparently expected that 
the Jewish Christians would continue for 
the time being to observe the Sabbath, but 
that the Gentile Christians would not adopt 
the observance. 

Meanwhile, a new and distinctively Chris- 
tian festival was growing up in the Christian 
Church. We have no definite information 
in regard to the origin of the new custom, 
but the indications of its observance begin 
to appear early in the apostolic age. It was 
150 



THE LORD'S DAY 

on the first day of the week that Paul spoke 
to the Christians at Troas, assembled on the 
eve of his departure for Jerusalem. He 
exhorts the Corinthian Christians to make 
contributions periodically on the first day of 
the week to relieve the poverty of the church 
at Jerusalem. We can hardly fail to recog- 
nize the indication that the first day of the 
week was already established as a time of 
periodical meetings of the church. In the 
second century we have abundant evidence 
of the habitual observance of the first day 
of the week as the time of periodical as- 
semblies of the Christians for worship. Ap- 
parently, the name, "the Lord's Day," 
which is the designation used in the text that 
we have taken from Revelation, becomes the 
prevalent name. Justin Martyr refers to 
the observance of that day by the Christians, 
and associates it with the story of the crea- 
tion of light on the first day according to 
the first chapter of Genesis, and with the 
resurrection of Jesus; he makes no refer- 
ence to the divine rest on the seventh day. 
True to the spirit of the early church is the 
expression of the significance of the Lord's 
Day in one of the noblest of our hymns: 
151 



THE SABBATH AND 

"On thee, at the creation, 

The light first had its birth; 
On thee, for our salvation, 

Christ rose from depths of earth; 
On thee, our Lord, victorious, 

The Spirit sent from heaven; 
And thus on thee, most glorious, 

A triple light was given." 

In Pliny's famous letter to Trajan, asking 
for instructions how to deal with the Chris- 
tians, he refers to their habit of meeting on 
a stated day for worship. 

We have no record of any action of the 
apostles collectively or of any individual 
apostle enjoining upon the brethren the ob- 
servance of the Lord's Day. It seems to 
have been a spontaneous movement of the 
church thus to celebrate the day on which 
the Lord Jesus by his own resurrection 
"abolished death and brought life and im- 
mortality to light." 

The Lord's Day, then, in its original con- 
ception, was essentially a day of worship. 
It was the day in which the Christians pro- 
posed to celebrate that great fact of the 
resurrection upon which the church was 
founded, and to draw perpetual inspiration 
from that ever blessed memory. In the 
152 



THE LORD'S DAY 

early years the Lord's Day could not be a 
day of rest. Many of the Christians were 
slaves, and they had to work when they were 
bidden by their masters. Living as they did 
in Jewish or pagan communities, it was im- 
possible for them so far to control their life 
in relation to other people as to keep the day 
free from the ordinary duties of life. When 
Christianity became the dominant religion 
of the Roman empire, the Christians showed 
a disposition to have ordinary forms of duty 
suspended so far as was practicable, in order 
that they might have leisure for the worship 
to which they wished to devote the day. One 
of the first Sunday laws, promulgated in the 
reign of Constantine, provided that the 
courts of justice should be closed on the first 
day of the week excepting for two items of 
business; one was the manumission of the 
slave from the power of his master, the other 
was the emancipation of the son who had 
become of age from the authority of his 
father, and his investiture with the rights of 
manhood. The exceptions are as significant 
as the prohibition. For all other business 
the courts must be closed, but no day was 
too sacred to celebrate the investiture of a 
153 



THE SABBATH AND 

man with the rights and dignities of man- 
hood. 

The institution of the Lord's Day, then, 
is no mere change of date of the Sabbath. 
The whole spirit of the institution is abso- 
lutely distinct. If the Sabbath was pri- 
marily a day of rest, the Lord's Day is pri- 
marily a day of worship. If the Sabbath 
reminded the Israelite of his deliverance 
from the bondage of Egypt, the Lord's Day 
is to the Christian the perpetual memorial 
of life and immortality brought to light 
through the resurrection of Jesus. For the 
Christian, then, the obligation of a Sabbath 
in the spirit of the Old Testament is done 
away forever. The Christian is no more 
called upon to observe the Sabbath than to 
practice sacrifice or circumcision. The 
phrase, "Christian Sabbath," which has 
often been applied to the Lord's Day in 
recent times, originated in a misconception, 
and is unknown in Christian literature be- 
fore the twelfth century. 

To the early Christians the Lord's Day 

was the one great characteristic festival. 

They met on that day for worship, and, so 

far as was practicable, they kept the day 

154 



THE LORDS DAY 

clear from ordinary occupations, that their 
private and social worship, their grateful 
commemoration of that day on which hope 
was born, might be free from distraction. 
In later Romanism the conception of the 
Lord's Day underwent some changes. In 
the multiplication of holy days which char- 
acterized the elaborate ritual of later 
Romanism, the Lord's Day lost somewhat of 
its unique significance. Moreover, in the 
general Judaizing tendency which developed 
in later Romanism, it is not strange that the 
Lord's Day came to be confounded with the 
Jewish Sabbath. While there was an effort 
to make the observance of the Lord's Day 
in some respects more strict by importing 
into it Jewish prohibitions, the general tend- 
ency, in a church whose growing formality 
was in large degree smothering the old fire 
of Christian spirit, was to make the day a 
holiday rather than a holy day. 

In the beginning of the Reformation there 
was naturally a tendency to restore the 
Lord's Day to something like its original 
primacy as the one sacred day of Chris- 
tianity. And the early reformers — Calvin 
and Knox, no less than Luther — were true 
155 



THE SABBATH AND 

to the spirit of the early church in sharply 
distinguishing the Lord's Day from the Sab- 
bath, and recognizing the Sabbath as a Jew- 
ish institution which had passed away. The 
Lutheran reformation, however, failed to 
redeem the church from the vicious practice 
which had grown up under Romanism, of 
making the Lord's Day a holiday rather 
than a holy day. The characteristics which 
we have been accustomed to associate with 
the phrase, "Continental Sunday," are much 
the same even to this day in countries pre- 
dominantly Lutheran as in those which are 
predominantly Catholic. 

In contrast with Lutheranism, English 
Puritanism made a most vigorous protest 
against degrading the Lord's Day to the 
character of a holiday. Unhappily, this 
movement of the English Puritans, so com- 
mendable in spirit, was vitiated by being 
based on a false principle. The Lord's Day, 
in Puritan thought, was identical with the 
Sabbath, and was most commonly spoken of 
by that name. The Westminster Confes- 
sion declares that God "hath particularly ap- 
pointed one day in seven for a Sabbath, to 
be kept holy unto him; which, from the be- 
156 



THE LORD'S DAY 

ginning of the world to the Resurrection of 
Christ, was the last day of the week; and 
from the Resurrection of Christ was changed 
into the first day of the week, which in 
Scripture is called the Lord's Day, and is 
to be continued to the end of the world as 
the Christian Sabbath." It is noteworthy 
that no other of the great historic creeds of 
Christendom enunciates such a doctrine. 
The prohibition of work was interpreted by 
the Puritans as strictly as it had been by 
the Jews. But while the Jewish Sabbath, 
strict in prohibition of work, allowed freely 
social enjoyment, the Puritan Sabbath of 
England and Scotland and New England 
forbade not only work but also all social 
enjoyment. The Westminster Confession 
declares that those who keep the Sabbath, 
"do not only observe an holy rest all the day 
from their own works, words, and thoughts 
about their worldly employments and recrea- 
tions; but are also taken up the whole time 
in public and private exercises of his wor- 
ship, and in the duties of necessity and 
mercy." The Puritan Sabbath gained ac- 
cordingly an austerity which was as unlike 
the Jewish Sabbath as it was unlike the 
157 



THE SABBATH AND 

Lord's Day of the primitive Christians or 
of the Lutheran Reformation. The Puri- 
tan Sabbath was, in fact, one of the worst 
expressions of the morbid solemnity of Puri- 
tan character. 

For better or for worse, the Puritan Sab- 
bath is dead. For that we may be thank- 
ful. It was false in principle, and it so 
utterly violated human nature as to make 
inevitable a disastrous reaction. The Puri- 
tan Sabbath is gone; what is to take its 
place? Shall it be the Continental Sunday, 
with churches empty and theaters and beer 
gardens full, a day with rather less of work 
than other days and with much more of up- 
roarious amusement? 

It is not easy to decide exactly what we 
ought to do. The application of ethical 
principles in practice must always depend 
largely upon questions of degree, questions 
of less or more. All human conduct must 
be more or less of a compromise. But the 
first step to right practice is a true principle. 
What we wish to maintain is, not the Puri- 
tan Sabbath nor the Jewish Sabbath, but 
the Lord's Day; and we would maintain 
that day in the spirit of those early Chris- 
158 



THE LORD'S DAY 

tians who rejoiced in the new life which had 
come to them from the Lord's resurrection. 
There is, indeed, a moral element beneath 
the Jewish form of the fourth command- 
ment. The moral element of the fourth 
commandment is the principle of the neces- 
sity of special times for worship, private and 
social, which, but for specially consecrated 
times, would be crowded out by the pressure 
of work and amusement. And, while there 
is a moral value in the suspension of ordinary 
work to give opportunity for worship, I do 
not fail to appreciate the hygienic value of 
a day of rest or change of employment. 
But, while there is an undeniable moral and 
hygienic value in the suspension of all ordi- 
nary work on Sunday, so far as practicable, 
it is perfectly obvious that a formal and rigid 
prohibition of all work on that day must be 
recognized as obsolete. Is it a sin on Sun- 
day to engage in physical or mental labor, 
to buy and sell, to study, to travel? No! 
But it is a sin on Sunday to do anything un- 
necessary which will tend to forfeit for our- 
selves or to impair for others the blessing 
which the Lord's Day, rightly used, may 
bring to the Christian world to-day as in 
159 



THE SABBATH AND 

all the Christian centuries. When we ask 
if it is wrong to do this, that, or the other 
particular thing on Sunday, we are asking a 
question whose spirit is essentially Pharisaic 
rather than Christian. The right question 
for us to ask is, What conduct on our part 
will make the most of the day in spiritual 
blessing to ourselves and to others ? 

Starting from this principle, of course, 
we cannot forbid all work. If we forbid all 
works but those of necessity and mercy, we 
must give the words "necessity" and "mercy" 
a great deal broader meaning than they 
had to the Puritan. All work which the 
general welfare and convenience of society 
requires, is right in Christian ethics, and 
should be lawful in a Christian community. 
The more complicated organization of so- 
ciety, and the more minute division of labor, 
characteristic of our modern life, tend in 
some ways to diminish the amount of Sun- 
day labor which is necessary. But, unhap- 
pily, those conditions concentrate the ne- 
cessity for Sunday labor in the case of 
particular classes. In Puritan times the 
Christian farmer hitched up his family horse 
and drove his family to church. Few families 
160 



THE LORD'S DAY 

to-day possess a family horse. The horses of 
the community are largely kept in livery 
stables ; and to a large extent the horse as a 
means of travel is superseded by the forces of 
steam and electricity. The means of rapid 
travel and communication bring us into in- 
timate relation with people whose homes are 
distant from our own. These changes illus- 
trate the general principle that the necessity 
of a large number of people doing a small 
amount of work on Sunday, has in great 
degree given place to the necessity of a small 
number of people doing a large amount of 
work on Sunday. Of course railroad trains 
must run, mails must be carried, and the tele- 
graph and telephone must afford oppor- 
tunity for communication, on the Lord's 
Day. The question whether public libraries 
and museums should be open at certain 
hours on Sunday, is not to be answered by 
any prohibition of the Decalogue, but must 
be answered by a conscientious endeavor to 
estimate the effect of such opening upon the 
general life of the community. 

Of course it would be folly to seek to make 
men religious by legislation. But a pre- 
dominantly Christian community has the 
161 



THE SABBATH AND 

right to maintain legislation which will pro- 
tect public worship from unnecessary inter- 
ruption and interference. The day which 
the dominant religious sentiment of the com- 
munity holds sacred we have the right to 
protect from unnecessary secularization. It 
is reasonable, therefore, that public offices 
should be closed. Shops and places of busi- 
ness may reasonably be required to be closed 
on Sunday, with the exception of places for 
the sale of medicines, food, and various other 
articles which it is necessary or convenient 
to have accessible every day. Of course 
amusements of purely amateur character 
should not be forbidden, but should be sub- 
ject to such regulation as regards time and 
place as to avoid any serious interference 
with the quiet and order of public worship. 
The danger of transforming our Sunday 
into a wide open Continental Sunday comes 
from the pecuniary interests which can make 
a gain by the complete secularization of the 
day. I think we are justified in maintain- 
ing a prohibition of public amusements of 
every kind conducted for the purpose of 
making money, whether by the collection of 
an admission fee or by some other device. 
162 



THE LORD'S DAY 

The prohibition of commercialized amuse- 
ments and the judicious regulation of 
amateur recreations is probably the best 
policy for the present. 1 In most of the States 
of this part of the country there are old Sun- 
day laws on the statute books which have 
come down with little change from the days 
of the Puritans. These laws are in general 
more stringent than is justified by sound 
principle or wise policy. But it is a difficult 
problem to modify them without running 
the risk of excessive license. The interests 
that clamor for a wide open Sunday are not 
in general those that are most beneficial to 
the community. 

As I have already remarked, an inevitable 
consequence of the growing complexity of 
society and the increasing division of labor 
is that a large amount of Sunday work on 
the part of certain classes of the community 
is necessary. The conscientious employer 
of labor of any of those kinds that must be 
done on Sunday will surely feel bound to 

1 The laws which have been recently passed in New York 
and Connecticut, and the similar legislation which is at present 
advocated in other states, opening the door to commercialized 
amusements, seem to me unnecessary and unwise. Such legis- 
lation, I fear, will prove to be a long step in the direction of 
the Continental Sunday. 

163 



THE SABBATH AND 

arrange the program of work in such wise 
that every employee will be free for some 
considerable part of the Sunday or free on 
some Sundays. 

A question which for most of us is more 
practical than the question of Sunday legis- 
lation or the question of guarding the labor- 
ing classes from the complete loss of the 
privileges of Sunday, is the question of the 
proper use of the day by Christian men 
and women whose time is in a considerable 
degree at their own disposal. What are we 
to do with the Sunday if we have the good 
fortune to be so situated that we can do 
in general what we please? 

Of course we shall go to church. The 
Lord's Day was the day of social worship 
from the time of its origin. It was the neces- 
sity of a time consecrated to public worship 
that developed the Lord's Day into an in- 
stitution. Social worship is now as always 
the characteristic feature of the day. A 
half-century ago there was doubtless among 
the more earnest members of the churches 
an excessive amount of going to church. 
There can be little doubt that the pendulum 
has swung too far in the opposite direction. 
164 



THE LORDS DAY 

Even church members in general take too 
little time for attendance upon public wor- 
ship. In all the ages of Christianity the 
public preaching of the word has been one 
of the most important means of grace; and 
the value of the sermon is not, as most peo- 
ple in our time seem to think, in inverse 
ratio to its length. It is worth while to take 
time for public presentation, exposition, and 
defense of the great truths of Christianity. 
But we do not go to church simply to hear 
a sermon. There is inspiration in prayer 
and hymn. There is immense utility in the 
cultivation of Christian fellowship. 

We shall study the Bible in our homes and 
in Sunday schools and other assemblies of 
that sort. The lack of knowledge and ap- 
preciation of the Bible is one of the weak- 
nesses of the church to-day. Every Chris- 
tian is bound to be in greater or less degree 
a student of the Bible. I do not think, 
however, that we shall make our read- 
ing on Sunday exclusively religious in the 
narrower and more technical sense of that 
term. We shall read good literature which 
is morally inspiring. We shall not spend 
the Sunday hours over the yellow journals 
165 



THE SABBATH AND 

and the sporting columns of the Sunday 
newspapers. The Christian student in 
school or college will not take the Sunday 
to learn the lessons which he ought to have 
learned on Saturday. He will find an im- 
mense benefit, not only in a strictly reli- 
gious point of view but also in the mainte- 
nance of mental freshness and physical 
health, in taking the opportunity on Sunday 
for reading which is considerably different 
from that which engages his attention on 
the other days of the week. In general, we 
shall not make the Sunday a waste-basket, 
into which we can throw all trivial odds and 
ends of work which we have neglected dur- 
ing the week. 

The Sunday will be to us a home day. 
Families will be able to be together and to 
get acquainted with each other on Sunday 
in a degree which is impossible in the rush 
and turmoil of the business of the week. If 
we are absent from home and kindred, one 
of the fit employments of the day will be the 
writing of letters to the home friends. The 
cultivation of those domestic affections which 
make a large part of the blessedness of hu- 
man life may well be one of the characteris- 
166 



THE LORD'S DAY 

tic employments of the day. We shall take 
some time to visit the sick and those who are 
shut in, and minister to them somewhat of 
sympathy and comfort. 

To some extent the Sunday will be for us 
a day of recreation. We shall choose recrea- 
tions of a quiet and unobtrusive sort. We 
shall get out of doors, walking in the open 
fields if we live in the country, walking in 
parks and similar places if we are compelled 
to live in the city, taking into our souls the 
healing ministry of nature. But we shall 
avoid those recreations which are obtrusive, 
and those whose practice on our part would 
tend to encourage others to make Sunday 
merely a day of amusement. There is noth- 
ing sinful per se in moving from place to 
place on Sunday in any kind of vehicle or 
with any means of propulsion ; but a bicycle 
scorching along the highway with the cos- 
tume of the wearer reduced to the lowest 
terms consistent with the requirements of 
decency, or an automobile rushing along at a 
speed of sixty miles an hour and burying 
unhappy pedestrians beneath its clouds of 
dust, is not suggestive of the holy calm and 
peacefulness which befit the Lord's Day. I 
167 



THE SABBATH AND 

am disposed to be very charitable in regard 
to the amusements which are used on Sunday 
by those working people who are closely con- 
fined all the week. For the ostentatious 
amusements of the rich who can take leisure 
whenever they choose, I have far less of 
toleration. The demands of the managers 
of commercialized amusements, which 
threaten the complete secularization of the 
Sunday, derive much of their plausibility 
from the costly and conspicuous amusements 
of the rich. 

Of course we can lay down no hard and 
fast regulations for the proper use of Sun- 
day. There must be charity for wide differ- 
ence of opinion and practice. Only in all 
our thinking and all our acting let us hold 
fast to the true principle. The purpose of 
the day is to gain for ourselves and to help 
others to gain all the inspiration that we can 
from the blessed memory of life and immor- 
tality brought to light by Christ Jesus. Let 
us make the most of the day for those holy 
purposes. Business and other daily cares 
will be kept, so far as may be, out of our 
thoughts, not because those things are sin- 
ful, but because we have no time for them. 
168 



THE LORD'S DAY 

We are too busy with the employments 
which specially befit the day. 

I have said that the Sabbath was a shadow 
which has passed away, while the Lord's 
Day abides. And yet, if we take a long 
look into the future, the Lord's Day itself 
becomes a shadow which will pass away. 
The perfect life needs no set time of wor- 
ship, for all activity is instinct with the 
spirit of worship. John saw no temple in 
the New Jerusalem. There is no need of 
sacred places when all places are sacred, and 
the soul is conscious of the divine presence 
everywhere. There is no need of holy times 
when all time is holy. The church and the 
Lord's Day will serve their purpose in our 
earthly life, if they help to fit us for that 
heavenly life in which the church and the 
Lord's Day will no more be needed. 



169 



VII 
METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 



VII 
METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 1 

Thirty years ago the edifice in which we 
meet to-day was erected. One hundred 
years ago this church was organized. One 
hundred and twenty-five years ago the Mid- 
dlefield Circuit was organized, including ap- 
pointments for preaching in Middletown 
and other towns in the vicinity. One hun- 
dred and fifty years ago the work of Meth- 
odism in the northern colonies of England 
in America had its beginning. I have been 
asked to deliver a historical address ap- 
propriate to this composite celebration. 
What shall be my theme? 

When the invitation came to me, my 
thoughts turned first to this local church. 
Fifty-five years ago I joined this church by 
certificate from my home church, when I 
entered college ; and for all that time except- 
ing three years I have been connected with 
this church and more or less active in its 

1 Address at the Centennial Celebration of the First Meth- 
odist Episcopal Church of Middletown, Connecticut, 1916. 

173 



METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 

work. My license to preach was signed by 
Heman Bangs as presiding elder, who had 
been pastor of this church in 1827. I have 
been personally acquainted more or less in- 
timately with every pastor that this church 
has had since 1849. Amid the throng of 
personal reminiscences which this anniver- 
sary suggests I thought of speaking of this 
local church and of the men and women that 
I have known and loved. Altogether apart 
from my personal feelings and experiences, 
this local church is one whose history is full 
of interest. It is one of the historic churches 
of Methodism. Among those who have been 
its pastors were four college professors and 
three college presidents. One of its pastors 
was the leading man on the committee that 
prepared the Methodist hymnbook of 1849, 
which was the first hymnal of the church 
that possessed in some degree the character 
of catholicity, instead of being mostly a col- 
lection of the hymns of the Wesley brothers. 
One of its pastors was a member of the 
committee which prepared the much better 
hymnal of 1878, the last hymnal adopted 
by the church before the one which we now 
use. Two of the lay members of this church 
174 



METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 

bore a share in the preparation of the latest 
and best of our hymnals. One of its pas- 
tors was editor of The Christian Advocate; 
one was, and one now is, editor of the Meth- 
odist Review; one was, and one now is, a 
missionary secretary; and one is now a 
bishop. A goodly number of the most emi- 
nent men of Methodism have preached either 
in the present church or in the one which 
preceded it. In the former church were 
often heard the voices of those two illus- 
trious men, presidents of Wesleyan Uni- 
versity in the early days, Willbur Fisk and 
Stephen Olin. 

However interesting might be the mem- 
ories of this local church, on second thought 
it seemed to me that the time of this service 
could be used most profitably in bringing 
before you the general theme of the work 
of Methodism in New England. 

The Wesleyan movement in England was 
purely evangelistic. The last thing that 
Wesley dreamed of was the foundation of 
a new sect. He lived and died a presbyter 
of the Church of England, and his mission 
was chiefly to men who recognized some sort 
of allegiance to that church. He sought to 
175 



METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 

awaken to a genuine Christian life men who 
were already nominal adherents of the same 
church to which he himself belonged. Com- 
paratively little emphasis was placed on 
dogma. The Wesleys were Arminian in 
their theology: Whitefield was a Calvinist. 
But the Wesleys and Whitefield were alike 
orthodox ministers of the Anglican Church. 
In that communion Arminianism and Cal- 
vinism have always existed side by side, and 
have been reckoned equally orthodox. 

In the southern colonies of America the 
role of Methodism was in the beginning very 
much the same as in England. Before the 
Revolution the Anglican Church was the 
dominant ecclesiastical organization in those 
southern colonies. There, as in England, 
Methodist preachers sought no change in the 
ecclesiastical relation of the people to whom 
they ministered. Anglicans themselves, 
they appealed to Anglicans for a deeper 
and more earnest religious life. 

When Methodism entered New England, 
the situation was entirely different. Then, 
as always, the spirit of Methodism was evan- 
gelistic; but the Christmas Conference in 
1884 had brought into being a new religious 
176 



METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 

denomination, the Methodist Episcopal 
Church. Methodism in America no longer 
represented a revival in the Anglican 
Church; Methodism in America had be- 
come a distinct sect. When Jesse Lee in- 
vaded New England he came into a country 
where there was no lack of churches and 
pastors, but those churches and pastors were 
not Anglican but Congregational. Congre- 
gationalism was the established church of 
New England. When people were awak- 
ened and converted by the influence of 
Methodist evangelists, the event generally 
involved a change in their ecclesiastical re- 
lations. The convert became generally a 
proselyte. When, in 1791, Bishop Asbury 
made his first visit to New England after 
a tour through the comparatively sparsely 
settled districts of the Carolinas and 
Georgia, he wrote in his diary: 

"We are now in Connecticut, and never out of 
sight of a house; and sometimes we have a view 
of many churches and steeples, built very neatly 
of wood; either for use, ornament, piety, policy, 
or interest — or it may be some of all these. I 
do feel as if there had been religion in this coun- 
try once ; and I apprehend there is a little in form 
177 



METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 

and theory left. There may have been a praying 
ministry and people here; but I fear they are 
now spiritually dead." 

There was undoubtedly in New England a 
great deal more of genuine religion than 
Asbury supposed. The churches in every 
village were not only evidences of religion 
in the past, but were the shrines of a reli- 
gion which still survived. But while Asbury 
was doubtless unjust to the New England 
churches, there was altogether too much in 
the condition of those churches which gave 
countenance to his severe judgment. There 
was in the Congregational churches of New 
England much of the formalism which is 
very apt to exist in an established church 
of whatever name or creed. The great re- 
vival of 1740 had long since spent its force. 
Ministers and people alike too often main- 
tained the form of religious worship with 
very little of genuine spiritual life. The 
stern and repellent creed of Calvinism had 
provoked inevitable revolt, not only in the 
mild form which had given rise to the Uni- 
tarian and Universalist churches, but in the 
more radical form of avowed rejection of 
Christianity. Our country owes indeed very 
178 



METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 

much to the help of the French army in 
the Revolutionary War; but the presence 
of the French in America was in one re- 
spect an evil influence. The free-thinking 
officers who abounded in the French army 
had made infidelity respectable and popu- 
lar. The established church of New Eng- 
land had largely lost its influence on the 
young mind of the country. In 1795 it is 
said that only eleven students in Yale Col- 
lege acknowledged themselves as Christians, 
and four years later the number was re- 
duced to four or five. There was need of 
a new preaching with evangelistic power and 
without the encumbrance of a Calvinistic 
creed. I heard a friend and a brother 
in the ministry declare in a Methodist as- 
sembly only a few years ago, that he be- 
lieved there was no village so small or al- 
ready occupied by so many churches that 
there was no room for a Methodist church. 
I was astonished to hear an utterance that 
seemed so anachronistic. But however un- 
reasonable such a proposition may seem in 
our time, it was the view which was held by 
the Methodist invaders a century and a 
quarter ago. They were doubtless some- 
179 



METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 

what uncharitable, but their belief was prob- 
ably not very far from the truth. 

Methodism in New England was, then, 
from the beginning, a denominational move- 
ment and a movement on definite theological 
lines. In the Holy Club of Oxford there 
were both Arminians and Calvinists, but 
Methodism in America was always Armin- 
ian. Calvinistic Methodism never made any 
appreciable impression upon the religious 
life of America. In New England the Meth- 
odist invasion was the beginning of a con- 
flict between Arminian Methodism and Cal- 
vinistic Congregationalism. The contro- 
versy which was once so intensely acrimon- 
ious on both sides we can contemplate now 
very calmly. We recognize to-day a truth in 
Calvinism and a truth in Arminianism, 
though we may frankly confess ourselves 
unable to coordinate those two truths. We 
are no nearer a settlement of the great 
problem than Milton's fallen angels who 

". . . Apart sat on a hill retired, 
In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high 
Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate — 
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute — 
And found no end, in wandering mazes lost." 
180 



METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 

We all believe in the freedom of the will. 
Our mental attitude is that expressed in the 
saying of Doctor Samuel Johnson — "I 
know I am free, and that is the end of it." 
But we do not believe that God suddenly 
found himself disappointed when Adam 
ate the forbidden fruit, and considered what 
scheme he could adopt to save as much as 
possible out of the wreck of the moral uni- 
verse. I think we are bound to recognize 
to-day that the logical victory in the con- 
troversy was with the Calvinists, but that 
their opponents had the practical truth. 
No theological system was ever so logical 
as extreme supralapsarian Calvinism, but it 
was the most abhorrent system of theology 
ever invented. It was abominably logical. 
I think the Calvinists had the advantage not 
only in logic, but also in exegesis. Paul 
the apostle inherited a good deal of his the- 
ology from Saul the Pharisee, and I think 
there is no reasonable doubt that the Epistle 
to the Romans does teach the doctrine of 
foreordination. But Arminianism is a good 
working theology. The unsolvable prob- 
lems are shoved into a dark corner where 
ordinary common-sense people cannot see 
181 



METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 

them. To those Methodist preachers of a 
hundred years ago, Arminianism appeared 
to be a complete solution of the relations be- 
tween the divine and the human will. We 
who know that the problems involved are 
essentially insoluble, transcending the power 
of human thought, accept the Arminian 
creed as a pragmatic conception which 
serves well as a basis for practical Christian 
life. 

New England Calvinism a hundred and 
fifty years ago was not exactly the same as 
the Calvinism of Calvin. Calvin, I suppose, 
felt as sure of his own election as he was of 
the reprobation of Servetus ; but New Eng- 
land Calvinists held that the assurance of 
faith was the privilege only of a few emi- 
nently gifted saints. The attitude of New 
England Calvinists in regard to personal 
religious experience was not unfairly repre- 
sented in the version of their creed which 
passed current among their Methodist op- 
ponents: "If you seek religion, you cannot 
find it. If you get it, you cannot know 
it. If you have it, you can never lose it. 
If you lose it, you never had it." Such a 
creed leads all too easily to practical indif- 
182 



METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 

ference and formality. I yield to no one in 
admiration for the splendid saints of New 
England Calvinism — for the men who were 
willing to be damned to eternal misery if 
their damnation might be for the glory of 
God, as brave soldiers are willing to fill 
with their dead bodies the moat across which 
their comrades must march to victory. But 
comparatively few people are of sufficiently 
heroic mold to find satisfaction in a reli- 
gious life under those conditions. A gospel 
that appealed far more powerfully to the 
average man was that of the Methodists, 
with their doggerel rhymes, 

"But this I do find— 
We two are so joined, 

He'll not stay in heaven 
And leave me behind." 

Certainly the Arminian style of religious 
experience, if it has less of sublime austerity, 
appeals more strongly to the common sense 
of the average man. 

The Calvinistic controversy is now mat- 
ter of history. The Congregational and 
Methodist Churches of New England, work- 
ing side by side, have experienced in large 
degree a mutual conversion. There is prac- 
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METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 

tically now no difference in their theology. 
Members, and even ministers, are trans- 
ferred back and forth between those two de- 
nominations without making or professing 
any change whatever in their theological be- 
liefs. There is practically no difference in 
the conduct of the ordinary church services. 
A stranger who strayed into one of the 
churches for a Sunday service would usu- 
ally hear nothing whatever which would 
show him whether it was a Methodist or a 
Congregational church. In practice the 
principal difference is that in the Methodist 
church pastors are annually appointed by 
the bishop, while the Congregationalist 
churches make the arrangement for them- 
selves. Our arrangement has the great 
practical advantage that every church has 
a pastor and every minister has a church. 
There is no long interregnum between suc- 
cessive pastoral terms. In many cases, how- 
ever, even this difference is only formal, the 
bishop simply ratifying an arrangement 
which has been already made. In Canada 
a movement is in progress, and seems likely 
at no distant date to be successful, to 
unite the Methodist and Congregationalist 
184 



METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 

Churches in one organization. It would re- 
quire very little change to unite the Meth- 
odist and Congregationalist Churches in 
New England. 

The hundred years have brought in many 
respects great changes to New England 
Methodism. We no longer worship in 
barns, or in obtrusively ugly churches dif- 
ferentiated from barns chiefly by the rudi- 
ment of a steeple. Many of our churches 
are large and costly ; some of them are beau- 
tiful. Our services have come to be more 
elegantly arranged. With our present truly 
catholic hymnal, we sing the best hymns of 
the church universal, the hymns of all ages, 
of all lands, and of all creeds. We sing those 
hymns to tunes of more artistic character. 
Our ministers, instead of being, like most of 
the early Methodist preachers, taken from 
the plow or the shoemaker's bench, are edu- 
cated in college and theological school, and 
in many cases have had the cosmopolitan cul- 
ture of travel and study in foreign lands. 
Their preaching is far more scholarly than 
that of the early days ; our spirit as a church 
is more tolerant; our theology is more ra- 
tional. 

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METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 

But what has become of the evangelism 
which was the inspiration and the justifica- 
tion of early Methodism? Jesse Lee and 
others of the early Methodist preachers in 
New England looked upon New England 
as missionary ground. Every sermon was 
evangelistic; every sermon was a definite 
call to repentance from sin, and to the be- 
ginning of a Christian life. While all the 
services were evangelistic, seasons of special 
revival were frequent, and in those revivals 
large numbers of converts were added to 
the churches. In the history of this church 
from its beginning in 1816 to 1857, inclusive, 
the Annual Minutes of the Conference 
record eight times a net increase of fifty or 
more in its membership. Only once since 
1857 has a net increase of fifty members in 
one year been recorded. In the section of the 
Discipline specifying the tests by which the 
fitness of a candidate for the ministry should 
be judged, appears in the earlier editions 
the question, "Are any truly convinced of 
sin and converted to God by their preach- 
ing?" Not until 1880 was the clause in- 
serted, "And are believers edified?" Of 
course the change in the Discipline followed 
186 



METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 

a change in practice which had been in 
progress for a long time. The church had 
gradually come to recognize the edification 
of believers as a legitimate and important 
aim of the work of preaching. At present 
there is plenty of edification in the preach- 
ing ; but sinners are not called to repentance, 
and there are no sinners in the congregation 
to be called. Our prayer meetings have un- 
dergone a corresponding change. Some of 
us, whose scanty hair shows the frosts of 
three-score winters or more, remember a 
time when strangers used to come into a 
Methodist prayer meeting out of curiosity 
to see what those queer Methodists were 
doing; and sometimes 

". . . Fools who came to scoff remained to 
pray." 

There was usually a series of "testimonies" 
of personal experience, echoing the words 
of the blind man in Jerusalem, "One thing 
I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I 
see." The meeting frequently, and in some 
places almost uniformly, closed with an in- 
vitation to the unconverted to rise for 
prayers. In our prayer meetings now we 
187 



METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 

have an edifying exposition of a passage of 
Scripture. No invitation to the unconverted 
is given, for none of the unconverted are ex- 
pected to be present. Our churches gen- 
erally report at the end of the year a small 
net addition to their membership, but the 
addition to our church membership comes 
almost exclusively from our Sunday schools. 
Our own daughters, when they reach the 
age of fifteen or thereabout, generally join 
the church, and a much smaller proportion 
of our sons do the same. The churches gain 
very few additions excepting from the in- 
crease of the families of their members or 
adherents. A church which depends simply 
on the natural increase of its families for 
accessions to its membership is not rapidly 
conquering the world. 

Is there no need of evangelism to-day? 
We do not, like our Methodist fathers a hun- 
dred years ago, think of the membership of 
other churches as a mission field from which 
we are to secure converts. We recognize 
to-day that the other churches are just as 
good as we are. But what are we doing for 
the unchurched multitudes of our popula- 
tion? A hundred years ago the population 
188 



METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 

of New England was pretty nearly homo- 
geneous. Not all the population, indeed, 
could claim to be lineal descendants of the 
remarkably prolific company that came over 
in the Mayflower; but even those who did 
not belong to that order of hereditary 
nobility were for the most part people of 
the same race, the same language, the same 
traditions. In our population to-day are 
hordes of immigrants from all countries of 
Europe, who have lost their faith in the 
national churches of their homelands, have 
acquired no interest in any churches in this 
country, and are living lives of practical 
heathenism. With the change in the char- 
acter of the population, and, in some degree, 
as the cause of that change, has come a 
change in the form of industrial organiza- 
tion. Manufacture is no longer carried on 
for the most part in little shops where the 
proprietor and a few hired men worked to- 
gether, all belonging substantially to the 
same class in society. Now we have immense 
impersonal aggregations of capital, and 
huge armies of working-men and working- 
women who have no social relations with 
their employers. These people, to a very 
189 



METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 

large extent, look upon the church as be- 
longing to the plutocracy which they regard 
as their oppressor. They feel, therefore, a 
hostility to the church which varies in in- 
tensity and malignity from cynical distrust 
to the brutal ferocity of the I. W. W. Our 
churches are surrounded by immense masses 
of a practically heathen population. What 
are we doing for those masses? By proxy 
we are doing some missionary work in 
China. What missionary work are we doing 
in Middletown? 

We must have more of the true democracy 
of Christianity. We must recognize our 
brothers and sisters in Italians and Poles 
and Hungarians, in Jews and Chinamen. 
We must find some means of changing in- 
dustrial strife to industrial cooperation. Our 
economists must find a more democratic — 
a more Christian — industrial organization. 
But that problem I will not now discuss. 

We must try to get these heathen around 
us into our churches. When Bishop Tho- 
burn returned to this country after an 
absence of a number of years in India, he 
said: "I am impressed by these two things 
in our congregations — the absence of very 
190 



METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 

poor people, and the absence of bad people 
except sinners of higher social position. 
You must be willing to have a revival that 
will bring the bad people to the church." 

One obvious barrier which tends to keep 
these people out of our churches is the sys- 
tem of raising money by selling or renting 
pews. In the mutual conversion of Meth- 
odism and Congregationalism in New Eng- 
land, Methodism has learned from its older 
sister a great many good things and some 
bad things, and the worst of the bad things 
which it has learned from Congregationalism 
is the private ownership of pews in churches. 
In the Methodist Church the system first 
became common in New England, where 
Methodism first became Congregational- 
ized. The Methodist Discipline of 1820 
gave the following direction in regard to 
the building of churches : 

"Let all our churches be built plain and decent, 
and with free seats ; but not more expensive than 
is absolutely unavoidable; otherwise the necessity 
of raising money will make rich men necessary to 
us. But if so, we must be dependent on them, yea, 
and governed by them. And then farewell to 
Methodist discipline, if not doctrine too." 
191 



METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 

It is noteworthy that the phrase, "with free 
seats," was first inserted in 1820. The rest 
of the paragraph had been in the Discipline 
from the beginning of the existence of the 
Methodist Episcopal Church (except that 
in the earliest edition the buildings were 
called "chapels"). The specific direction 
that the seats should be free was added in 
1820, not because the sentiment in favor of 
free seats first became dominant in the 
councils of the church at that time, but, 
rather, because the leaders of the church 
recognized the evil of the departure from 
the earlier practice which was already in 
progress. In the barns and barnlike 
churches of the older days the seats were 
free of course. The further progress of the 
new system of church finance was shown by 
the fact that in 1852 the General Conference 
felt itself bound to qualify the direction that 
the seats should be free by the insertion of 
the phrase, "wherever practicable." In the 
second edifice which was occupied by this 
church, built in 1828, not only were pews 
rented, but many of the pews were sold, so 
as to become permanently a part of the real 
estate of their occupants. In this building 
192 



METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 

in which we worship to-day, never, thank 
God, have the pews been sold or even for- 
mally rented; though our system of assign- 
ing seats to people who make subscriptions 
for the support of the church is, after all, 
only a disguised form of pew rental. In an 
important sense a pew belongs to the man to 
whom it is assigned, whether he formally 
pays rent or not. I have very great sym- 
pathy with the pride of a working-man who 
will not obtrude himself as a perhaps un- 
welcome guest into a seat which belongs to 
somebody else, and who will not take a seat 
which no one has cared to preempt, and in 
which his presence would be a confession that 
he could not or would not pay for a seat. 
Never can we get the unchurched people to 
come into our churches until every vestige 
of private property in seats is banished from 
what we call the house of God, and the 
seats are as free as they were in the barns 
in which our fathers worshiped. Never can 
we get the unchurched people to come 
into our churches until we are willing 
to have sitting beside us the poorest, the 
dirtiest, the wickedest man or woman in 
the town. 

193 



METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 

Another thing that we must do to make 
our services more attractive to people who 
are not church members is to make those 
services more varied. In general, the Sun- 
day evening service is simply a dilution of 
the morning service. The sermon is usually 
a little shorter and a good deal weaker. We 
must make our services more varied. If 
people will not come to hear a long talk 
with a little music, it is worth while on the 
Sunday evenings to make the experiment 
of a short talk with a good deal of music. 
We have already got away from the respect- 
able uniformity of our services sufficiently 
to introduce occasionally pictures projected 
by the lantern. I think we must be up to 
the times and bring in moving pictures. If 
we cannot get the people to come to our 
churches to hear the gospel, we must, like 
Wesley in the early days of Methodism, 
carry the gospel to the people where they 
are. So far as we can get permission to 
do so, we must preach the gospel in the 
parks, at the seaside resorts, in the shops. 

But there are things which lie deeper 
than mere external methods and which are 
more important. If we are going to reach 
194 



METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 

the unchurched masses, we must have a 
Christlike sympathy with sinners, with the 
lost. We must have a new evangelism — 
new not simply in the sense of being a re- 
vival of evangelism after an interval of 
time, but in the sense of being different in 
some degree in spirit and principle from the 
old evangelism. Christ said of himself that 
he "came to seek and to save that which was 
lost." He came not to save those who were 
in danger of being lost at some time in the 
future, but those who were lost. John 
Wesley invited to join his societies people 
who desired to "flee from the wrath to come," 
and a great deal of the evangelism of the 
past has been the expression of a desire to 
save people from hell. The spirit of the 
new evangelism must be a desire not to save 
people from a hell about which we know 
very little, but to save people from sin 
which is appallingly real. 

For this new evangelism we need a 
deeper, more intense conviction of sin. The 
early converts to Methodism had a profound 
conviction of sin, and, when they found 
peace in believing, they felt, like the woman 
who bathed the feet of Jesus with her tears, 
195 



METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 

that they were much forgiven, and they 
loved much. They could sing, with genuine 
feeling, 

"Love I much ? I've much forgiven ; 
I'm a miracle of grace." 

In the revivals of a century ago people who 
were awakened to a sense of sin often had 
an experience of almost despairing grief for 
days or weeks before they found peace, won- 
dering whether sinners as bad as they felt 
that they were could be forgiven, imagining 
that they had committed the unpardonable 
sin and passed beyond the reach of hope. 
We read of these agonies to-day with a kind 
of contemptuous pity. There is no Slough 
of Despond in the path of the modern pil- 
grim, and no castle of Giant Despair near 
his route. Alas! in the flat monotony of 
our lives there are no Delectable Mountains 
and no Land of Beulah. 

Our Methodist fathers a century ago were 
inclined to distrust the Christian character 
of any man who could not tell of a violent 
emotional experience of conviction and con- 
version — a blackness of darkness, and a light 
above the brightness of the sun. They had 
196 



METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 

no sympathy with the conception of a child 
growing into a Christian life without any 
definite epoch of conversion. The children 
of the church were expected to wander into 
sin and to be reclaimed in some revival 
through the traditional emotional paroxysm. 
Not until 1856 did the Discipline recognize 
the baptized children of the church as pro- 
bationary members. The pendulum has 
swung so far in the opposite direction that 
there is a tendency now to distrust the Chris- 
tian character of any man who has not main- 
tained perfectly respectable conduct through 
all his life. 

Most of us in this generation joined the 
church in childhood. Thank God that we 
did. We cannot be too thankful for the 
providence of God that saved us from the 
curse of years of outbreaking immorality 
or years of arrogant and aggressive irreli- 
gion. But, in the nature of the case, those 
who commence a Christian life in childhood 
can have at the time no deep conviction of 
sin. They have never committed any out- 
ward acts which are very bad, and their 
moral sense is too immature to appreciate 
the profound spirituality of the ethical teach- 
197 



METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 

ings of Jesus. For those who grow in moral 
thoughtfulness as they grow in years, whose 
consciences become more tender and sensi- 
tive, who day by day and year by year gain 
a deeper appreciation of the awful antith- 
esis between sin and righteousness, a reli- 
gious experience beginning in the innocence 
and thoughtlessness of childhood may ripen 
into the noblest type of Christian character 
which the world can know. But the weak- 
ness of the church lies in the fact that a large 
share of its membership consists of people 
who joined the church in childhood simply to 
please their parents, or because church mem- 
bership was considered respectable; whose 
physical growth has been accompanied 
by little of intellectual and less of moral 
growth; who have remained in the church 
simply because they have committed no 
flagrant deed of immorality for which they 
could be expelled; but who have never ac- 
quired any sense of the heinousness of sin, 
and have never felt any aspiration for any 
goodness above the standard of social re- 
spectability. 

We must feel that intense conviction of 
the exceeding sinfulness of sin which finds 
198 



METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 

noble expression in those lines from Whit- 
tier's "Eternal Goodness": 

"I bow my forehead to the dust, 

I veil my eyes for shame, 
And urge, in trembling self-distrust, 

A prayer without a claim. 
I see the wrong that round me lies, 

I feel the guilt within ; 
I hear, with groan and travail-cries, 

The world confess its sin." 

With such intense conviction of sin and 
righteousness we shall feel, not alone our 
own sin, but the sin of others. Like the 
Master, we shall bear the sins of the world. 
In that spirit we shall find means to reach 
the masses around us. Whatever obstacles 
may lie in the path, they will give way to 
the force of intense conviction. We shall 
think of church membership, not as a policy 
of insurance protecting us against the chance 
of future loss, but, rather, as an enlistment 
for service. The church has often been 
thought of as an ark wherein a favored few 
are floating over the waves of a deluge in 
which the mass of humanity is hopelessly en- 
gulfed. If the church is to be symbolized 
by any kind of floating craft, it must be by 
199 



METHODISM IN NEW ENGLAND 

a mighty battleship, in which there is no 
room for passengers and plenty of work for 
all the crew. Let us greet the new century 
in the spirit of a church that is truly militant. 



200 



VIII 
THE CHRISTIAN ERA 



VIII 

THE CHRISTIAN ERA 

No birthday has ever been celebrated as 
has been the reputed birthday of Jesus of 
Nazareth. The supposed year of his birth 
is made by all civilized nations the starting 
point of their chronology. The date of 
every document is a memorial of his birth, 
whether it be the letter of love or friendship, 
the academic diploma, the memorandum 
which records a bargain between individuals, 
or the solemn treaty concluded between na- 
tions. What means the exceptional impor- 
tance which the civilized world attaches to 
that one man? One thing at least is certain: 
the nineteen centuries which have passed 
away since the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, 
are marked as a period of history standing 
by itself, isolated broadly from everything 
that had gone before. These centuries have 
been marked by the development of a com- 
monwealth of nations, and of a type of social 
and public life, radically distinct from any- 
203 



THE CHRISTIAN ERA 

thing developed in the civilization of an- 
tiquity. This commonwealth of nations we 
call Christendom. This new type of social 
and public life we call Christian civilization. 
Whatever views anyone may take in regard 
to the character and work of Jesus himself, 
or in regard to the supernatural claims of 
Christianity as a religion, Christendom and 
Christian civilization are unquestionable 
facts of history, and facts of history whose 
importance grows upon the mind the more 
they are studied. 

But every student of history knows well 
that men's names sometimes come into a 
sort of accidental association with events in 
which they had comparatively little causal 
agency. Is it so with the relations between 
Christendom and Christian civilization, and 
Jesus Christ? Is it a mere accident that this 
commonwealth of nations, and this new type 
of social and public life, have developed 
themselves in the centuries that have elapsed 
since the birth of Jesus? We call George 
Washington the father of our country; and 
yet it is quite among the possibilities that 
our country might have been very much the 
same thing as it is now had George Wash- 
204 



THE CHRISTIAN ERA 

ington never lived, Greene was perhaps a 
greater general than Washington; Hamil- 
ton perhaps a greater statesman than Wash- 
ington. Great and good as Washington 
was, and influential as he was for good in 
the history of our country, he was only one 
of many influences which conspired to make 
our country what it has been; and it is pos- 
sible that the history of our country might 
not have been very different had that one 
great and good influence been subtracted. 
Is it so with the connection between Christ 
and Christendom? Is Christ Jesus only one 
of a multitude of influences that have de- 
veloped the modern type of civilization, and 
would it have been about the same without 
that one influence? 

This is a reasonable question for our con- 
sideration. That we may gain some light 
upon it, let us take a hasty glance at the con- 
dition of the world at the time of the birth 
of Christ. Let us consider what elements 
there were in the constitution of society at 
that time which were capable of developing 
into that new and higher civilization which 
has characterized these modern centuries. 
When we glance at the world at the time of 
205 



THE CHRISTIAN ERA 

Christ, our attention is at once arrested by 
those three great cities whose names are the 
symbols of all that is greatest and best in 
the traditions of ancient history — all that is 
most important in the never-to-be-forgotten 
legacy which the past has left to the pres- 
ent and to the future. We turn instinc- 
tively to Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem. 
What was there in each of these — what was 
there in all of these combined — that had in 
it the seeds of the new and higher civiliza- 
tion? 

We turn first to Rome. It was in many 
respects a grand epoch in the history of that 
great city, and of the empire over which that 
city ruled. The chaos of factions had been 
subdued by the might of one strong hand. 
The iron doors of Janus were closed. Peace 
reigned from the Euphrates to the Pillars 
of Hercules — peace and order and law. The 
Eternal City was just undergoing its meta- 
morphosis from brick to marble. Litera- 
ture, which had been introduced from 
Greece, and which had been nursed as a 
tender exotic through the stormy times of 
war, had at last become thoroughly natural- 
ized, and was bursting into brilliant bloom. 
206 



THE CHRISTIAN ERA 

Surely, there was much of hope for the 
world. 

But look at the other side of the picture. 
It was an age of unbelief. The stately cere- 
monies of the old political religion of Rome 
were still punctiliously performed, but per- 
formed by men who had lost faith in the 
religion whose rites they celebrated. The 
mind of the age had drifted into atheism, or 
had been carried into captivity by all sorts 
of foreign superstitions. It was the time 
when, according to the sneer of Gibbon, the 
same man was a priest, an atheist, and a 
god. It was a time of utter hypocrisy. It 
was a time of shameless vice. The legend 
of Lucretia, with its glorification of womanly 
purity, belonged to a remote and well-nigh 
forgotten past. At this time the Roman 
matrons counted the years, not by the annual 
succession of consuls, but by the succession 
of husbands whom they had forsaken. 
Divorce was so easy that marriage was al- 
most abolished. Those verses of the first 
chapter of the Epistle to the Romans which 
are usually omitted when that chapter is 
read in social or public worship, represent, as 
every student of classic literature knows, 
207 



THE CHRISTIAN ERA 

the commonplace facts of Roman life. The 
nation wallowed in filth indescribable. And, 
if the legend of Lucretia belonged to a well- 
nigh forgotten age, to that same remote past 
belonged the story of Cincinnatus, with its 
glorification of honest labor. The system of 
slavery had perverted the industrial life of 
society. All work was done by slaves, and 
business had fallen into that partial paralysis 
which slavery brings. The unjust steward 
of our Saviour's parable could not dig, and 
to beg he was ashamed. The mass of the 
Roman people were ashamed to dig, but to 
beg they were not ashamed ; and vast multi- 
tudes were supported by various forms of 
public and private mendicancy, and lived in 
idleness and uselessness and in the practice 
of every namable and nameless vice. The 
patriotism of the little republic of the Tiber 
had been a pretty savage sort of thing at 
its best. It is far more than a fact of Latin 
lexicography that the same word meant a 
stranger and an enemy. It reveals a dark 
side of the character of the Roman people. 
The conquests by which the little republic 
had grown into a world-wide empire, were 
pretty savage conquests. The faith which 
208 



THE CHRISTIAN ERA 

the Romans had kept with other nations was 
little, if at all, better than the Punic faith of 
which they complained in their enemies. 
Now that the little republic had expanded 
into a world-wide empire, patriotism had 
grown rather thin in stretching over so wide 
a territory. But, if patriotism had declined, 
there had been no decline in the savagery 
with which the ancient patriotism had been 
associated. With that world-wide empire 
there had come no recognition of universal 
brotherhood. True, indeed, a Roman 
audience might applaud when they heard on 
the boards of the theater, "I am a man, and 
nothing human can be alien to me"; but 
how far the Roman populace appreciated 
that lofty sentiment was well shown by the 
frantic eagerness with which they thronged 
to gaze upon the perilous sports of the 
circus and the brutal combats and massacres 
of the amphitheater. It was an age of un- 
belief and hypocrisy, saturated in vice, 
steeped in cruelty. 

From Rome we turn to Athens, the center 

and soul of Greek mythology — Athens, the 

teacher of the beautiful to all future ages 

— Athens, where the statues of the gods, 

209 



THE CHRISTIAN ERA 

carved with almost superhuman genius from 
whitest marble, so thronged every street 
that it was easier to find a god than a man. 
What hope for the future was there at 
Athens ? Alas ! the fair humanities of Greek 
religion had become the corrupter of man- 
kind. The imagination of the Greek poets 
had given to primitive nature myths a form 
more intensely anthropomorphic than they 
had elsewhere assumed. The gods of the 
popular mythology were not vague symbols 
of cosmic forces, but men and women of like 
passions with the people who had once been 
their worshipers. And in an age of unbelief 
reverence had given place to ridicule. It 
was about that time, according to the strange 
story related by Plutarch, that a sailor, be- 
calmed among the Ionian Islands, heard a 
mysterious voice commanding him to pro- 
claim, when he arrived at Palodes, that "Pan 
is dead." Whatever you may think of the 
queer story, it is very certain that Pan was 
dead — very dead; and not only Pan, but all 
his fellow divinities, great and little, from 
the high council of Olympus, down to the 
nymphs of forest and mountain, of river and 
ocean. Nothing was left but a mass of im- 
210 



THE CHRISTIAN ERA 

moral legends, whose power for evil was 
made only greater by the transcendent 
beauty of the language in which the foul 
stories were told. 

But, if Greek religion had little in it that 
was hopeful, what shall we say of Greek 
philosophy? It had given to the world the 
glorious example of the life and death of 
Socrates — the inspiration of his faith in a 
life immortal. It had given to the world 
those writings of Plato, which approach, 
perhaps, more nearly than anything else of 
classic literature, the purity and spirituality 
of Christianity itself. But even the highest 
forms of Greek philosophy were unfitted to 
accomplish for the masses of mankind any 
purification of thought and elevation of life. 
In the teachings of Plato, the idea of God 
never altogether disengaged itself from 
pantheism, and virtue was regarded as the 
prerogative of an intellectual aristocracy. 
The most popular form of Greek philosophy 
was that of Epicurus, and the disciples of 
Epicurus had left far behind them the pure 
and gentle lif e of their master. Recognizing 
pleasure as the only good, they had plunged 
with utter abandon into every form of self- 
211 



THE CHRISTIAN ERA 

indulgence and vice. Their creed was that 
which was expressed by the elders whom 
Ezekiel saw in his vision, working all abomi- 
nations in the chambers of their imagery — 
"The Lord seeth us not, the Lord hath for- 
saken the earth" ; and their lives were worthy 
of their creed. What little virtue there was 
in the world at that time was chiefly to be 
found among the Stoics, and there is some- 
thing grand in the stern resolution with 
which some of them stood out against the 
evil of their times. But it was a dark and 
hopeless struggle — a struggle brightened 
by no faith in a better future — a struggle 
doomed to inevitable defeat with no escape 
but suicide. Far and wide was unbelief, and 
the hopelessness that unbelief brings. The 
question of Pilate, "What is truth?" might 
have been heard on every side, and in every 
variety of tone from flippant indifference to 
heart-broken despair; and truth there was 
none — truth upon which the human soul 
could lean and find strength for life's strug- 
gles — truth which could brighten earthly 
darkness with heavenly light. 

Turn we then to Jerusalem. There at 
least must be hope. There dwelt a people 
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THE CHRISTIAN ERA 

whose leader and lawgiver in the far-off 
past was believed to have stood face to face 
with Jehovah — a people who had learned 
somehow those truths, never altogether for- 
gotten, of the unity and the holiness of God. 
They had indeed lapsed again and again into 
idolatry, and at last been carried into cap- 
tivity ; but a remnant had returned — a rem- 
nant, the flower of the nation. They had 
returned to the Land of Promise, never 
again to doubt the grand doctrine of the 
unity of God which was the corner-stone of 
their religion. Their religious enthusiasm 
had been fired by the glowing prophecies of 
the younger Isaiah. They had rebuilt the 
temple and reestablished its time-hallowed 
ritual, under the inspiration of the tri- 
umphant faith of Haggai and Zechariah. 
Their zeal for the ancient law had been 
strengthened by the stern puritanism of 
Ezra and Nehemiah. And now, on the sum- 
mit of Moriah, sanctified by holiest memo- 
ries of the past, had arisen the new temple 
of Herod, shining like a colossal gem in its 
snowy marble and dazzling gold. There, at 
least, there must be hope. 

But one who entered the precincts of that 
213 



THE CHRISTIAN ERA 

temple would have found there the same rot- 
tenness of unbelief and hypocrisy that he 
would have found in Rome and Athens. 
There, too, were Sadducean priests perfunc- 
torily performing the ritual that had come 
down from their fathers, with no faith in the 
religious meaning of the rites which they 
celebrated, no faith in the grand prophetic 
word of immortality. But, if there was no 
hope in that clique of Sadducees who held 
the high-priesthood and the high places of 
society, was there not some hope in the sect 
of the Pharisees? There, indeed, was rever- 
ence for the ancient law, but reverence in 
which there was more of superstition than 
of religion. They had planted hedge after 
hedge around the law, until its ethical mean- 
ing was lost in a jungle of petty details. 
They tithed mint and anise and cummin. 
They devoured widows' houses, and thanked 
God that they were not as other men. 

True, the picture of those times was not 
altogether black, for everywhere there were 
gleams of brightness through the gloom. 
Amid all the foul corruption of Roman so- 
ciety there were hearts and homes and loves 
that were sweet and pure. Amid all the 
214 



THE CHRISTIAN ERA 

unbelief and vice of Epicureanism, there 
were men worthy of a better day, who stood 
out in grand, though hopeless, conflict with 
the evil of the times. Amid all the worldli- 
ness of the Sadducees and the formality of 
the Pharisees, there were Simeons waiting 
for the consolation of Israel; there were 
Nathanaels who were Israelites indeed in 
whom there was no guile. There were treas- 
ures which had come down from the past, 
and which the world could never forget. 
There were truths revealed, and truths dis- 
covered. There were the Pentateuch, and 
the prophecies of Isaiah, the Iliad, and the 
Dialogues of Plato. Much there was which 
might be made to form the material of a 
new and higher civilization; but there was 
need of something to vitalize — to render 
growthful — the elements of truth and beauty 
and goodness which were already in the 
world. As we gaze on the civilization of that 
age, we seem to stand with the prophet in 
the valley of his vision, where the bones were 
many and very dry, and spontaneously 
bursts from our lips the cry, "Come from 
the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon 
these slain, that they may live." 
215 



THE CHRISTIAN ERA 

If that prayer of the ancient prophet had 
been breathed over the dead bones of the 
civilization of the Augustan age, it would 
not have been breathed in vain ; for it was at 
this time that a Jewish peasant and his wife, 
going up to Bethlehem, were crowde.d out 
of the inn, and sought shelter in a stable, 
and there that peasant woman brought forth 
her first-born Son. Augustus on his throne 
knew not that that peasant Boy was to 
establish a world-wide empire. The phi- 
losophers of the Porch and the Garden knew 
not that that Galilsean Peasant was to 
utter words whose simple and majestic wis- 
dom would echo through the ages, when their 
labored speculations would be forgotten. 
Sadducean priests, as with hypocritical 
punctiliousness they went through the per- 
formance of their ritual, knew not that 
that ritual would pass away like a shadow 
before the universal and spiritual religion 
which that Babe of Bethlehem was to pro- 
claim. 

The Babe of Bethlehem grew to be the 
Child and the Man of Nazareth. He lived 
in obscurity until thirty years of age, work- 
ing at the carpenter's trade. Then he ap- 
216 



THE CHRISTIAN ERA 

peared as a moral and religious teacher. His 
theology was the fatherhood of God. His 
ethics was the brotherhood of man. He 
formulated nothing; he promulgated no 
system of philosophy; but he gave hints of 
glorious truth in which the world has recog- 
nized a grander philosophy than man had 
ever known. He talked, not with the hesi- 
tating utterance of sages who are groping 
after the truth, but with the certainty that 
belongs to the direct vision of God. Yet his 
chief influence lay not in what he said, but 
in what he was. In the utter blackness of 
this world of sin, he lived, the one white spot 
in human history, challenging even his bit- 
terest foes to convict him of sin, and chal- 
lenging them in vain. He uttered seemingly 
contradictory things about himself, and yet 
by the force of his mysterious personality 
they were blended into unity. "I am meek 
and lowly in heart," said he, and then — "He 
that hath seen me hath seen the Father." 
And the words which on any other lips 
would have been so grotesquely incongruous, 
when uttered by him formed a perfect unity, 
like the seamless robe that he wore. He 
died, and in his death he revealed the infinity 
217 



THE CHRISTIAN ERA 

of divine love to a sinning, suffering world. 
He declared that in his death he would draw 
all men unto him, and all subsequent history 
has been the fulfillment of that prophecy. 
He rose again, and from the dark abode of 
death he brought back life and immortality. 

In Christ, then, was the new moral life 
which the world needed to convert the dry 
bones of a dead civilization into living forms 
of power and beauty. The fatherhood of 
God — the brotherhood of man — pardon re- 
vealed to a sinning race — the hope of im- 
mortality in a dying world — these were the 
elements from which was to come the new 
moral life to mankind. 

The new influence made itself felt first at 
Jerusalem; and worldly-minded Sadducees 
learned the sublime ideal of the kingdom of 
heaven, and Pharisees performing in dull 
formality their religious rites were delivered 
from the bondage of the letter into the free- 
dom of the spirit. The cumbrous ritual of 
sacrifice passed away like a shadow, when it 
was fulfilled in that one great example of 
self-sacrifice in which was the life of the 
world. The religion of the Jews, other and 
yet the same, became the religion of man- 
218 



THE CHRISTIAN ERA 

kind. The Jehovah of the Jews became the 
God and Father of all. The revelation which 
had been proclaimed by Moses and the 
Prophets, now glorified by the teaching and 
the life of Jesus, went forth conquering and 
to conquer. 

The new influence went to Athens. It 
transformed the intellectual life of mankind. 
To Epicureans seeking life's highest good 
in gross and brutal self-indulgence, the new 
religion revealed its spiritual and ennobling 
joys. To Stoics struggling against inevi- 
table ills, the new religion presented the sub- 
lime comfort of hope and faith in the un- 
seen and the eternal. 

Why is it, think you, that the philosophy 
of these modern centuries has been predomi- 
nantly theistic, while that of the ages that 
preceded them was atheistic or pantheistic? 
It is not that God is revealed in nature any 
more clearly now than in the days of Plato. 
It is no easier now to "look through nature 
up to nature's God," than when Paul de- 
clared that "the invisible things of him from 
the creation of the world are clearly seen." 
The influence that has transformed the 
world's thinking, and made it theistic in- 
219 



THE CHRISTIAN ERA 

stead of atheistic or pantheistic, is the influ- 
ence which has come from the life and teach- 
ings of Jesus. The world to-day believes in 
God because it believes in Christ. 

And the transformation has passed not 
only over the world's philosophy, but over 
its literature and art as well. True, indeed, 
writers of modern times have not all been 
saints, and not all of modern literature is 
very edifying reading; yet there is a vast 
contrast between the literature of to-day and 
that of ancient times. Much of modern lit- 
erature is pervaded and glorified by a de- 
votion to truth and goodness which has been 
inspired by the influence of Christ Jesus. 
You remember that impressive autobio- 
graphic passage in which Milton speaks of 
his desire "to leave something so writ as 
future ages shall not willingly let die," and 
of his conviction that the inspiration for 
such a work is to be sought, "not in the in- 
vocation of Dame Memory and her siren 
daughters, but in devout prayer to that 
Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and 
knowledge, and who sendeth forth his sera- 
phim with fire from his altar to touch and 
purify the lips of whom he pleaseth." 
220 



THE CHRISTIAN ERA 

"What is true and just and honest, 

What is lovely, what is pure, 
All of praise that hath admonisht, 

All of virtue, — shall endure; 
These are themes for poets' uses, 
Stirring nobler than the Muses. 

"0 brave poets, keep back nothing, 
Nor mix falsehood with the whole! 
Look up Godward; speak the truth in 

Worthy song from earnest soul ! 
Hold, in high poetic duty, 
Truest Truth the fairest Beauty." 

So sang Mrs. Browning, and in that spirit 
many a poet has sung, many a worker in 
literature and art has wrought, until the 
world is glorified with the supreme beauty 
of truth and goodness. 

The new influence went to Rome. It 
transformed the social and political life of 
man. The great truths of the fatherhood 
of God, the brotherhood of man, the infinite 
dignity and worth of the human soul, could 
not make themselves felt without transform- 
ing all social and political life. That truth 
of the dignity of the human soul, apart from 
every incident and accident of human life, 
brought with it of necessity the emancipa- 
tion of woman. It gave her what she had 
221 



THE CHRISTIAN ERA 

never had before, save in exceptional in- 
stances and under peculiar conditions — the 
opportunity of being at once free and pure. 
Those truths of the dignity of the human 
soul and the brotherhood of man soon led 
to the abolition of the bloody sports of the 
arena, and in due time brought about the 
abolition of slavery. They gave mankind 
a new conception of the relation of the in- 
dividual to the state. No longer could it 
be supposed that the individual was to live 
only for the state. It came to be recognized 
that the state fulfilled its office, that the in- 
stitutions of government served their pur- 
pose, only in so far as they contributed to 
the highest and noblest development of in- 
dividual human souls. The conception of 
brotherhood, expanding beyond the pale of 
nationality into the idea of universal brother- 
hood, gradually transformed the interna- 
tional life of man, and developed the idea of 
the commonwealth of nations. And now, out 
of the horror of these years of world war, 
is coming, we trust, the sudden fulfillment of 
the growing hope of the ages in the estab- 
lishment of a League of Nations. 

"The century's aloe flowers to-day." 
222 



THE CHRISTIAN ERA 

The religion which has accomplished all 
these changes in the past is not exhausted. 
The power that conquered Rome, Athens, 
and Jerusalem, is vital with the pulses of 
eternal youth. It is still going forth con- 
quering and to conquer. What achieve- 
ments await it in the future, only that Omni- 
science in which it had its birth can tell. 
Even now it is inspiring missionary activity 
on a scale unparalleled in the past for the 
enlightenment of lands darkened by pagan- 
ism and barbarism, and revealing more fully 
its power to cope with evils which still exist 
in lands of civilization and nominal Chris- 
tianity. The prejudices of race, the jealousy 
between rich and poor, the antagonism of 
capital and labor — all human problems and 
all human miseries — must find their solu- 
tion and belief in the religion of Jesus 
Christ. 

The new influence which created Christen- 
dom and Christian civilization, made itself 
felt first at Jerusalem, and afterward at 
Athens and Rome; and therein lies a para- 
ble. Therein lies an intimation of the truth 
that this influence is primarily a religious 
influence, that the source of all that is char- 
223 



THE CHRISTIAN ERA 

acteristic of this modern civilization is in a 
religious life — in the turning of individual 
souls from sin to righteousness. The new 
philosophy, the new literature, the new social 
and political organization, are secondary 
effects whose real origin is in the influence 
exerted on human character. In this thought 
we may find inspiration for individual duty. 
To accomplish great works of genius which 
make themselves felt in philosophy or liter- 
ature or social and political organization, 
falls to the lot of only a few. It falls not 
to our lot to write a "Principia" or a "Para- 
dise Lost," to break the fetters of a subject 
race, or to give to a nation a new political 
constitution. These are achievements for 
which neither ability nor opportunity has 
been given to us. But it is the privilege of 
every one of us to bear his share in that 
moral and religious activity from which is 
derived every other form of new and better 
life which constitutes our modern civiliza- 
tion. In the parable of the Master, the king- 
dom of heaven is likened to leaven hid in 
three measures of meal, whose influence 
spreads from particle to particle until the 
whole is leavened. In that process of the 
224 



THE CHRISTIAN ERA 

moral transformation of humanity every one 
of us may have his share. Each may catch 
from some other soul that has been trans- 
formed by the beneficent influence of Chris- 
tianity its high moral ideals, its lofty in- 
spiration; and each in turn may communi- 
cate that transforming power to others. 
And with this thought of privilege and op- 
portunity comes the solemn thought of re- 
sponsibility. In the eternal conflict between 
good and evil — in the progress of the new 
and higher civilization, ever resisted by the 
powers of evil incarnated in evil life and evil 
institutions — there is no neutrality. The 
words of the Master are as true as when 
uttered eighteen centuries ago, "He that is 
not with me is against me"; and still those 
solemn words, like an anticipation of the 
final Judgment, part mankind on the right 
and on the left, "as a shepherd divideth his 
sheep from the goats." In that parting, in 
comparison with which all earthly differ- 
ences are trivial and accidental, may we each 
and all be found on the right side. 



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